


CounterBalance

by Cara_Loup



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Adventure, M/M, Romance, Telepathic Bond, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 21:02:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 46,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5220698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cara_Loup/pseuds/Cara_Loup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A life-bond evolves in the Force. A murder charge is leveled against Han at the worst of times. And a scheming ruler launches her own plans for the new Jedi order. In the middle of a volatile mission, Han and Luke face the risk of losing everything they’ve had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	CounterBalance

**CounterBalance**

_If you choose to lose yourself to me,_  
_Keep in mind to save your mystery._  
_So my soul stays mine, alone,_  
_And yours may grow entwined but still is free._  
Eleanor McEvoy / Caroline Lavelle

**~ 1 ~**

Yavin Four. A bright blip on the small screen that relayed the Falcon’s destination to the engineering console. And a jolt to his pulse, quick and crystal-edged, after all this time. _Luke_. 

Han Solo slapped the console as if that could make a difference. The Falcon’s lounge was too quiet, and the return journey had never taken so damn long. Less than an hour now, ‘til they’d come up on Yavin Four with its trackless jungles and its brilliant, sun-blasted skies. The light-blip kept his mind tethered like a tractor beam.

Seven years back into the spotty, troubled past, this was where he’d shot his mercenary polish to hell, all because he couldn’t let one snot-nosed farmboy split his thick skull open on the Death Star’s steel plating. Where he’d let them hang a second-rate medal round his neck, though he felt its weight like a quirk within gravity. But the farmboy-turned-rebel-hero shone him a wild smile, and Han got another out of the Princess, and that was that. Time like a racetrack to some risk-dazzled horizon.

One year ago, Luke had settled for Yavin Four as his home base and the location for a Jedi training center, all hopes banked on an unlikely future. In between... other things had happened. 

Yavin Four, a stretch of darkness away, and that winking little blip triggered a streak of cold through Han’s bone-marrow. A whirl of ragtag sentiments scooting up right behind. Two long steps took him to the acceleration couch, and he dropped down on it with a sullen grunt aimed at no one. Twenty-five days after he’d zoomed out of the Yavin system, he was still wound in a tangle of resentment, injured pride, and shock-chilled bafflement. _Goddamnit, Luke, you don’t mean that!_ But he did. 

Sure, they’d had their fights before — lively, no-holds-barred shouting matches, tempers engaged — just bring it on and let the sparks fly. Wholesome outbursts that cleared the air, in Han’s books, and nothing like this last argument. This one had cut him where he lived. 

Unease bounced him back to his feet, and he thumped the food synth for another dose of kaffin. _I don’t want to fight with you_ , Luke had said the first time a clash of opinions shot through the roof, flushed and out of breath and knock-you-out gorgeous. _If you love me, you’ll have to_ , he’d answered. And Luke did. 

Han grabbed the recyclable cup the moment it rattled down the food synth’s delivery slot. _Three years, kid. We gotta make that count_. The betting pools on Coruscant hadn’t given them more than three months. A Jedi partnered with an ex-criminal, ex-Princess-consort, ex-unsavory in too many ways to count? The muck-stirring gossipers called it scandal, called it the stuff of salacious fantasy, and smirked in the face of something so bizarre. ‘Til they were all proved dumb as duds.

Three years, and counting. The kaffin’s black heat wouldn’t cover the bitter longer than a minute, so Han gulped it down standing. Luke’s face before him, clearer than all the topnotch holographic wonders could deliver and far more present, his eyes a deep desert blue. Challenge offered with the tilt of his chin and a fine edge to his voice most people wouldn’t even notice. Ambivalent prickles went on a tour through the pit of Han’s stomach.

An argument like no other, worn thin over grating pauses, crammed down the funnel of corkscrewed Jedi reasoning that torched Han’s mind into a blaze of denial. He’d have sworn that he’d never walk away from a hearty disagreement, but Luke — damn him — had pushed his patience past every limit. Left him nothing but the short-lived satisfaction of slamming doors and stomping off with some choice expletives kicked off his heels. 

Lucky, he’d thought at the time, that his upcoming assignment would keep him away for a couple weeks. Let Luke stew over the whole thing and rediscover that he missed Han more than all those mystical, Force-bred revelations combined. Seven days, Han had gauged the due date, not a minute longer. He’d never been so wrong. Twenty-five days gone, and not a word from Jedi headquarters. And the radio silence Luke kept up — like a blasted signpost to the deep end of trouble — was only the least part of the wrong.

At this point, Chewbacca stuck his head into the lounge and caught him brooding. Not that the Wook would ever be fooled about Han’s moods, past or current, but he could still die trying. 

“What’s up?” Han grumbled. “If you’re itching for another malfunction to fix, don’t look at me.”

Chewie returned that both his and Luke’s head wanted fixing, on the double, though he’d sooner kiss a droid than volunteer for the job. In other news, they were scheduled to pull out of hyper within five minutes.

“Time flies, huh?” Han binned his cup with an ill-aimed toss and didn’t bother to hide his relief. “I’ll be right there.” 

But the light-blip at the corner of his eye did strange things to his mind, like a ripple passing through the mortal quiet. Five days into his assignment, he’d realized that the silence scraping his nerves raw went beyond com frequencies. Might have noticed sooner, if the Corporate Sector’s own brand of loud-mouthed slime hadn’t kept him busy. But the wrinkle inside his mind that’d grown attuned to Luke’s presence had gone hollow and dry. Silence there too, in a place Han hadn’t even known existed for the longest time of his life. Shouldn’t matter any more than that minor glitch in the Falcon’s backup scanners. But this silence grew on him like a sneaky energy drain. Exposed him to the bass note of loss he kept hitting every night when he dropped down on his bunk. He _could_ live without Luke, if he had to, but — 

Goddamnit, the mere notion punched the bottom out of his stomach. And his mind replayed their last exchange in a dependable loop. 

_So you want me to leave, is that what you’re saying?_

_We both need time... and answers. Think about it, Han_. Like he was some jiggle-kneed adolescent, overdue for a lecture about making up his mind.

 _To hell with it, Luke. Don’t you know that I know what I want? Think about that_. Insert the bang of a much-abused door, and fade over into black. 

Didn’t take more than a week to admit that he’d overreacted. That he’d heard only the shuttered note of resolve in Luke’s voice, not the confusion. And perhaps, with his unchecked flare of temper, he’d started a rift that hadn’t even been there before. 

High time to fix that. Han marched towards the cockpit, cross-currents of harnessed energy grinding under the deck plates and up through his boots. He dropped into his flight chair next to Chewbacca as the primary’s fire scythed past the viewport. From the far side of the Denarii nebula, stars glittered like frost on a ghilnut tree. Much closer, a green moon hung between two thready limbs. Like a parting of two rivers.

 _Home_. Recognition went through Han like a razor-cut before he could slam up his defenses. For more than a decade, he’d followed the surreptitious pull that tugged him everywhere at once. Countless planets multiplied by unnumbered possibilities. Until, in recent years, the diffuse need crystallized, like scattered energy settling into a beacon that gave off visible light. _Luke_.

Fingers leaping across the controls, pulse speeding all the way down to his fingertips, Han swerved the Falcon into a nose-dive approach. _How in blazes are we gonna fix this mess?_ And his answer was still the same. _I don’t know. But we will. Hands down, we will_. 

* * *

At the center of the room, the projector beam formed a life-sized simulation. Each time Leia Organa moved or gestured, transmission sparkles ran off her frame. She talked with the usual precision, some ironic twists thrown in to ease the load of political forethought, but Luke found it hard to keep his mind on the briefing all the same.

Dareil. A prosperous world, a shrewd, unpredictable ruler, and a diplomatic mission replete with pitfalls and artfully veiled agendas. They needed to prepare for that.

“I haven’t met her in person,” Leia said, “but the seventeenth D’haya of the Dareilian dynasties enjoys a reputation as a brilliant strategist. It’s no small feat that she managed to retain her political influence through fifteen years of Imperial occupation, and that her leadership remains uncontested after the Empire’s fall.”

“Be on your guard,” Luke translated. “At all times.”

“Absolutely,” Leia agreed with a wry twist to her mouth. “The preliminary talks were complicated. At this stage, the New Republic can’t grant full membership, and the D’haya isn’t pleased.” She fingered the jewels at her throat, and sophisticated technology translated the reflections into minuscule glitters. “Pack for state functions by the plenty. By the way, is Han planning to come along?”

The question struck him unprepared, and Luke pulled up his shoulders against a swift pang. “I’m not sure. We’ve been... out of touch for a while.”

Ever since Han’s departure, twenty-five days ago. And through every hour of each day, emptiness had been staring over his shoulder.

“Something’s wrong.” Leia’s frown registered worries first, suspicions a close second. Nearer to her, Luke might have felt the resonance through their slender link. “Don’t tell me Han walked out—”

“No,” he cut in fast, “it was me, I suggested that we could use some time apart.”

“Oh.” The transmission limited Leia’s reaction to flat visual data. The look of concern that widened her eyes, restrained by the firm set of her mouth. “Luke, I don’t mean to pry... but you must know you can talk to me. Han and me, that was a long time ago.”

Luke dipped his head, and the short pause was enough to loop a tighter silence through his chest. How to spell out the essence of paradox? This abrupt switch from dazzling heights of discovery to a plummeting low, two sides of the same coin, cross-wired to a point of no return. He looked back at his sister, the only living soul who could perhaps relate, and tried to unravel the frustrating snarl from the source.

“There’s a link between Han and me,” he said slowly, “like the one we share, Leia. Through the Force. It just... grew on us over time.”

“I didn’t know that could happen.” The holo shimmered faithfully through every nuance of Leia’s puzzlement.

“Me neither. But I’ve pieced some things together from the sources I’ve reviewed.” Luke folded his arms, reciting facts in a voice as calm as glass. “The old order’s teachings include several ways of forming empathic connections. Like training links, like the links established by Jedi healers. Or the life-bond between chosen companions.” He paused before taking a step onto shakier ground. “It’s not a requirement that both partners be Force-sensitive.”

“You’re saying that such a bond has developed between Han and yourself?” Something in Leia’s tone told him that she’d already spotted the essential flaw. The lack of balance.

“It started long before I realized what it meant,” Luke answered. “A connection, a possibility to communicate on different levels. Like learning a new language, only that it’s far more complex.” He breathed out slowly, keeping memory at bay. “We worked it out together, but now it’s... evolving into something permanent. Irrevocable.”

“I see,” she murmured.

“Do you?” Luke asked with more force than he’d intended. “It’s suddenly beyond my ability to control. I can’t seem to keep things on a noncommittal level indefinitely. Maybe that’s just part of being a Jedi, or I haven’t the training to handle it right — I don’t know for sure, because there’s no one I can ask!” Banked frustration flared between each word, and he no longer knew how to quench it. “But sooner or later, the link we already share is going to deepen into a full bond.”

“And that’s a bad thing?” Leia asked cautiously. With sudden, keen clarity, Luke caught a reflection of Han’s humor and pragmatism in her voice.

“No, it’s... incredible to share so much. But every bonding or wedding ceremony I’ve ever heard of includes a possibility of _undoing_ such a tie.” A loophole, Han would call it. A back door.

“Then a life-bond can’t be undone?”

A leap of breath there, hot and rebellious. “It’s not totally impossible,” Luke replied, “but I can’t be sure that I’d be able to sever it on my own. There used to be Jedi Masters and healers in attendance. It can be damaging, if such a link is simply... torn.” And he had yet to find case studies that outlined the consequences for someone who hadn’t undergone Jedi training.

“But there’s more...” Luke turned his face towards the unlit side of their quarters, the room he’d shared with Han ever since they’d moved to Yavin Four. “If something happened to me, the repercussions could be ― Han’s _life_ could be in danger. Do you see? We’re suddenly facing an ultimate choice, and I don’t want to force Han to make this decision just because of who I am. It’s nothing he’d ever consider if it was just him.”

“Well, how does _he_ feel about it?” Leia asked, in the sober tones of a practiced arbitrator.

“He thinks I worry too much.” Luke expelled a breath grown thick with regret. “I probably didn’t explain it very well the last time we talked, but I’d only just realized what all of this might mean.”

Leia’s silence filled with the compassion he couldn’t bear, not now. “I’m sorry,” she said through the watery brilliance of the subspace holo. “About the timing, too.”

“Can’t be helped.” Luke cast a glance around the room that revealed no preparations for a journey due the next day. Not yet. “If Han doesn’t make it back on time—”

“I have a feeling that he will.” Across several lightyears, Leia smiled. Her sleeve rippled when she raised a hand to suggest an impossible touch. “Travel safe.”

The transmission broke up into unfocused pixels, and Luke’s smile slipped from his face like the compromise it was. Silence slammed into the room when he logged off, shored up between ancient walls. He closed the doors on all the high-tech inexpendables that the building sheltered. He walked down the hall like a ghost leashed to recollection.

Not enough time had passed to grow used to the shadow that walked with him through every room, the vivid resonance of laughter, arguments, grudging admissions and passionate reunions that made his breath catch. Memory settled in shivers against his skin and stormed every rational barrier he’d raised, with the rough candor in Han’s voice.

 _What you’re saying means forever. What if I can’t give you that? That’s not how I run my life_.

He’d wanted to argue, explain that he wasn’t asking for promises and their deceptive magic. But he’d pushed Han to the limit, until the fine crack between all or nothing showed, to make him understand. The labels attached to that boundary were meaningless; the crossing of it wasn’t.

 _That’s what I’m talking about_ , he’d answered. _This is about things neither of us imagined before_.

_And now you want me to tell you if I’m ready to step off that cliff?_

Luke closed his eyes. All the abrupt reversals in his own life had come in that shape. Sheer drops and unexpected falls that taught him the unmanageable art of catching himself.

Too long, he’d struggled for purpose and meaning, for something that would center him in the same way that elaborate structures of knowledge and learning had grounded the old Jedi order. Caged in a loneliness he hadn’t chosen, until Han broke him out of it. And now...

A single incalculable factor was tearing it all apart, unsettling his life from the inside out. _Of course I want this, how could I not? But how can I know if this is right ― when it’s right?_ Always the same questions. He eased the pressure with a long breath, considered Yoda’s unchanging answer like a crystal playing through facets of meaning. _You will know. When you are at peace_.

Warm, scented air grazed his temples like a quiet reproach. Luke paused on the doorstep. Peace was worlds away, no matter how he tried. Another moment, and recollection would come rushing the breach, rally the tantalizing images that flooded his dreams.

 _Believe_ , he repeated Yoda’s words to himself. _You must believe. Trust_.

Outside, afternoon sprawled with lazy abandon, broad streaks of sunlight picking out half a hundred shades of green in the jungle, painting angular shadows between newly constructed shelters and stacks of building materials.

Luke leaned against the doorway and looked across, at the stretch of land that had yet to earn the name of garden. Against the silvery backlight moved diffident silhouettes, buckling down with various degrees of resolve and impatience. Only an hour ago, he’d worked and sweated with them, releasing all the choked-up energy into mindless exertion.

There were nine of them now. Brought to him by the disparate forces of ambition, curiosity, coincidence and necessity. A thread of the Force ran in all of them, waiting for the touch that would waken and school each talent to its purpose. His responsibility for years to come.

Luke turned his face to the sky and let sunlight drench him with careless, unlimited warmth. _Not enough_. It was pulse more than thought, a tightening in his chest. _I can’t do this alone_.

* * *

The Falcon’s hatch opened on a vista that would count for the promised land in most everybody’s book. Lush, tropical growth and a sky like azure glass above all the layered green. Han stopped to haul in a chestful of real, undiluted air. He wasn’t going to feel like an intruder. Not here, where he’d plugged away to fashion something that would hold together longer than the old Rebel base.

“See you later, Chewie,” he called in the cockpit’s direction, making noises as if to mark this moment.

His temper switched gears as he stalked down the ramp, unrest kindling again with a vengeance. _Go and savor your freedom, Han. Go figure how much of it you can honestly kiss goodbye_...

Right. But freedom was a slippery thing, and pushing for another speed record along the serpentine route from Corellia to the fringes of the Corporate Sector brought only a short-lived rush these days. All the starlight burned up in hyperspeed couldn’t fill the empty corner in his mind that clenched insanely around nothing at all. Ironic, when that type of thing would’ve fallen under the heading of superstition and nonsense, less than a year ago. And now he missed Luke more than he’d ever thought he could miss anything, or anybody.

He took the footpath through the patch of jungle where untamed vegetation had overgrown the blackest scars. The old Rebel base had been blasted to cinders and splodgy masses of plasteel, all hail to the Empire. The Massassi temple ruins hadn’t been in much better shape when Luke cast one sweeping look around and said, _here_. By now, his refuge was a hodgepodge of restored walls and temporary structures. A mess ranging from promising to ramshackle and unfinished, the very mess Han had grown used to calling his home.

Instinct carried him past the kitchen wing and into the courtyard, a shielded space between sun-bleached walls and rock and clustering trees. His pulse rapped out a wobbly _here-goes-nothing_ message before his mind caught up. Luke was right there, squatting in front of Artoo and tapping one of the droid’s control panels as he talked to him, soft and earnest.

“Hey,” came out of Han’s mouth, an automatic output while the brain’s higher faculties took a vacation to nowhere.

Luke swiveled to his feet in one fluid motion, came towards him in a streaking blur like some high-speed shot out of a holo, leaving just enough time for Han to add, “’m sorry” — still on autopilot — before Luke’s hands caught on his shoulders and his arms wrapped around Luke in turn. Collision, pressure, relief, a sequence wound up in under a second.

“Me too,” Luke said breathlessly, “it was my—”

“No, it wasn’t,” Han cut in, “shouldn’t’ve torn off like I did, and we both know it.”

Luke had run out of words for the time being, and other things took over when a smile lit his face and stripped away the strangeness. All Han had to do was lower his head a little, and reality regrouped. Between their mouths, a held breath flushed out, shaded over into possessive warmth and the taste of summer on Luke’s lips. Cupping his jaw, Han pulled him closer, heartbeat stumbling from loneliness straight into hunger, but Luke’s response was every bit as impatient, filling up with a gentle heat that cruised over Han’s back. Too long, without this. Lips parting under thoughtless pressure, breaths shortened on a surge of recognition. He slid his hands down to Luke’s hips, tracked a quick tensing of muscles, and didn’t care who might be watching. Desire slipped through him, and something else, like the tingle that came with passing a hand through an unshielded energy field.

 _Go easy_ , Han reminded himself, when all he wanted was to move deeper into this and make it a homecoming in every way. Out here in the courtyard, under the blinding sun that hammered down on dry, caked soil.

“I should’ve listened,” he finished his sketchy admission of too-familiar flaws when Luke pulled back.

“Nothing to be sorry for.” The wide fan of a marimbi-tree cast wavering shadows across Luke’s face, tanned from days out in the sun that set high glints in his hair. But his smile still beat the brilliant daylight by miles.

“I’ll listen now,” Han said roughly. He’d been waiting and waiting and waiting just to see that smile. Could admit that now, when working things out took precedence over sparring with a chipped ego.

“I’ve figured out some things in the meantime,” Luke answered, “but—”

“They’re busy breeding new questions like crazy,” Han guessed. Nope, kiss and make up wouldn’t cut it this time — as he could’ve predicted — and if disappointment curled into his gut like some wriggly, metameric creature, he could ignore that.

“Yes,” Luke admitted. Eyes the color of clear water, studying him with the same vigilance that’d pushed all of Han’s attitude buttons, more than three weeks ago.

Blurry echoes flitted through his mind, spiked with critical friction.

 _Maybe we should spend some time apart. Han, I need to think_ ―

_What, am I crowding you? Why can’t we just face it when we get there?_

_And close our eyes to the consequences?_

Could be that years of clear sailing had made him too complacent, but Han still couldn’t wrap his mind round the problem. Like a true connection had suddenly reversed polarity and put up a wall of static between them. He could read the tracks of strain and exhaustion on Luke’s face, plain as a map of the Galactic Core.

“Look,” he started, with a display of confidence that wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny, “I’m sure we can get it all sorted out somehow — so long as we both want to.”

“I do,” Luke said fiercely. “Never doubt that. And we need to talk, but—”

“Let me guess.” Disappointment showed its needle-point teeth and sank them into Han’s gut. “You’re about to break camp ‘cause Leia’s dumped one of those high-risk, dubious-profit assignments in your lap.”

“She’s part of the team.” A small shrug lifted Luke’s shoulders, tightening his muscles under Han’s palms. “They’re expecting me on Dareil tomorrow. I’m running late as it is.”

Han spared a blistering thought for timing that stank worse than a Hutt’s yap. But how much of a difference could talking it out make anyway? This was a Jedi matter, a Force-sensitives matter, a thing operating in the gaps between fact and lofty speculation. And Han Solo, for all that he’d shared life with a Jedi over three years, was still a Force-blind member of the great unwashed.

“You’ve got yourself a faster transport now.” Han forced a casual tone. “We can still make it on time.”

“This mission will be full of official functions and diplomatic tight-rope walking,” Luke cautioned. Out of a habit Han recognized instantly: always place everybody else’s needs above your own.

“Hey, you want me along or not?” he asked, running his fingertips up the nape of Luke’s neck for good measure. Like so many times before, his body turned towards the heat source that was Luke’s presence, skipping riddles and imponderables to claim that nothing else mattered. They couldn’t stay apart anyway.

“Of course I do.” The answer came on a rushed breath, and Luke aimed a small grin at his own reaction. “I mean, if you can―”

“Got you.” Han released him, stemmed all misgivings in favor of provisional relief. Everything else’d have to wait until later. “What about your Jedi candidates? Will they be all right while you’re gone? Any new arrivals since I left?”

“Two more.” Luke gestured past the kitchen wing. “I’ve introduced them to some basic meditation techniques, and I’ve tried to explain about the Force... But of course their heads are full of rumors and fantasies. It will take time until they understand.”

“And meanwhile, you’re teaching them a lesson in humility,” Han commented dryly. Along a strip of crumbly, sun-baked soil, the chosen few labored to dig furrows for the planting.

“They need to forget all about ambition,” Luke said, “to discover something new.”

Eyes squinted against the glare, Han located the newcomers in another moment. A rangy boy from Ryloth, slender lekku coiled around his neck. Out in the unaccustomed sunlight, his skin had acquired a pale green tinge. Next to him worked a middle-aged woman, gray hair spilling over her back and bare arms.

“That’s Gayasza,” Luke said, noting the direction of his glance. “She’s worked as a healer all of her life. Her talent might be the strongest.”

Han cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “Isn’t she too old to start training now?”

“You know, that’s what Yoda said about _me_ when I arrived on Dagobah.” Amusement glittered briefly in Luke’s eyes. “How about you? How’d things go in the Corporate Sector?”

“Nothing much to it. I’ll tell you later.” Han let his head roll back, rubbing at a crick in his neck. Trying to make himself at home again inside his own skin. “Go ahead with whatever preparations you need to make,” he added. “I’ll get the Falcon ready in the meantime.”

* * * * *

  
**~ 2 ~**  


Dareil. Out of the glare that bathed the landing platform, they stepped into the spaceport’s transfer wing. Poured flowstone gleamed darkly from the vaulted lobby, the lambent backdrop for a huddle of silhouettes. Government functionaries, Han supposed, giving his battered old flight jacket a short, defiant tug.

“Kinda gloomy in here,” he said when one of the shadows swung towards them in a flutter of motion, elegant robes whispering on the glacial floor.

“Leia!” Luke quickened his steps. “I thought we’d meet at the reception. Is everything all right?”

“Now that you’re here.” Her smile flashed from twilight.

Han watched as they embraced, the folds of Leia’s cape swinging forward to envelop Luke. “What, you thought we’d get sidetracked by the scenery?”

Leia’s glance had registered and discarded his presence all in a split second. Now it returned to him with cool speculation. “Han,” she said impassively. “So you could make it after all.”

He shrugged. “I’m only here for the home cooking, Your Worship. Been a while since I had my last square meal.”

But the well-rehearsed banter glanced off like so much white noise. Leia had slipped her hand through Luke’s arm and steered him towards the exit, past the throng of second-tier diplomats. And from there, straight towards the flapping mandibles of political maneuvering.

Han followed at a slower pace, noticed that a whiff of coolant still clung to his shirt, and slapped down a good-boy reflex to button up his jacket. Might as well wear his working-class odor like some precious perfume. Half an hour into hyperspace, malfunctions in the Falcon’s cooling system had taken him by surprise and canceled every chance for a quiet talk with Luke. Though Luke, being his conscientious, ever-focused self, had spent his watch in the cockpit scanning file after file on Dareilian history.

In an adjacent mausoleum of equal murk, a government-owned hovercraft throbbed on standby. They took their seats in the back. With a Wookiee in attendance, it might’ve been a tight fit but, given a choice, Chewbacca had opted to stay on Yavin Four and make up for missed tree-time.

From the parking deck, the vehicle dove into a subterranean driveway. Han narrowed his eyes at the strips of orange gloaming that streaked past. “Anything wrong with power supplies around here?”

“The Dareilians are hypersensitive to light,” Luke answered.

“They lived underground for many generations,” Leia delivered the standard lecture for witless tourists. “The atmosphere wasn’t always as wholesome as it is today. The Dareilians began colonizing the planet surface only a few centuries ago.”

“That explains it,” Han said, just to show his appreciation. Not that it could make a dent in Leia’s frosted flare shields.

As an Imperial mainstay, Dareil had been off limits for every smuggler in his right mind; an Inner Rim coop milked for big profits that kept the Imperial machinery rolling, locked away under planetary shielding and orbital defenseworks. Flowstone production was just the latest addition to several prosperous industries evolved from mining for precious stones and conductive crystals. From a strictly economic point of view, the New Republic should be scrambling to collect Dareil’s opulent dowry.

Han shot a glance at the partition that screened off the driver’s cabin. “So, besides their support for the Emperor, what else got these people black-listed?”

“Equality issues, for the most part,” Leia answered. “Several offworlder communities have been established on the main planet. The largest being―”

“Corellian,” Han supplied.

“Yes. But none of the settlers who’ve lived here for decades enjoy the same civil rights as the natives. They’re still considered second-class citizens.”

“Anything else?”

A furtive smile escaped Leia’s professional detachment. “Gender discrimination,” she said. “Local tradition virtually excludes the male populace from political responsibility. Since the Imperial governor resigned, all the higher offices of state are once again in female hands.”

No doubt that she expected some teeth-flashing bristle of male ego. Han offered a tolerant shrug instead. “If it works. Like I’ve always said, females are the more rational―”

“Like _you_ always said?” Leia broke in, incredulous amusement getting the better of her.

Their exchange fetched a soft laugh from Luke. “Cut it out, you two.”

His hand moved to capture Han’s wrist, taking directions from a different impulse, from the drag of uncertainty and isolation. Han reached back with the same and held their fingers pressed together. Plain, physical contact overrode everything else for the space of a breath.

When he glanced up again, Leia’s eyes wandered from her brother back to him. “I think,” she started, “you should be aware that this society’s tolerance towards same-sex relationships is still somewhat limited.”

“Hey, we’re offworlders, we’re male, we’re freaks anyway.” Han spread his hands with deliberate nonchalance. “Luke’s gonna have to employ his scintillating charm to compensate for all those shortcomings. Unless being a Jedi makes up for it.”

Leia’s gaze softened towards him, and he grew uncomfortable the more she turned her sympathy on him.

“It should,” she answered. “There used to be a Jedi enclave on Dareil, and two of the current ruler’s predecessors were married to Jedi knights.”

 

A lift cabin whisked them up through the capital’s innards, and they resurfaced in the palace’s entrance hall. In the muted luster, the first face Han recognized belonged to General Crix Madine, Corellian compatriot and staunch upholder of military decorum. Madine looked him over and nodded a restrictive greeting as if his head might fall off his shoulders.

Han returned an irreverent grin free of charge, thinking he might’ve baffled Madine if he’d bothered to locate his underused dress uniform. Well, Luke could get away with wearing his Jedi blacks all the time. One of these days, Han thought, he’d try passing his informal array off as a philosophical statement.

The New Republic’s delegation closed around them, a spearhead formation ushered through large portals and down a concourse smothered in ankle-deep carpeting and tapestries. The inner sanctum was lit by a thousand candles, honey-thickened warmth surrounding them in unsteady brilliance.

As they filed into an audience chamber that would’ve suited the Imperial Palace on Coruscant, a gong’s hollow note trembled up, striking silence through the congregation. From a gallery above the portals, someone began broadcasting the visitors’ names, merits and biographical high points.

Han worked on an expression of stoic endurance. And sure enough, it wasn’t too long before his turn came.

“General Han Solo, military advisor to the High Council of the New Republic...”

And here he’d hoped he could tag along incognito, unnoticed except as Luke’s reliable ticket to public scandal.

Han tuned out for the recital of the decorations he’d received in the service of the New Republic. All through the muddle of territorial wars that ate up the first year after the battle of Endor, he’d put up with a formal role in the chain of command. Felt more like a straitjacket sometimes. Then, during one private get-together with Fleet Commander Rieekan that stretched from dusk ‘til dawn, he’d bartered for a commission that suited his preferences and gave him a lot more leeway than most of the brass hats considered proper. Military advisor was a loose term for a variety of assignments most of which the Council wouldn’t have touched with a blaster’s business end.

Beside him, Luke stilled to match the hyped-up gravity of the moment.

“Luke Skywalker, Jedi knight, Honorary Commander of the Alliance forces...”

Han used the pause for a quick sidelong study. All that candleglow catching in Luke’s eyes, playing with his lightened hair, like it followed some natural pull. Han quenched something in himself that reached out blindly, pointlessly, like the aching reflex of a phantom limb, and took stock of the gathering instead.

The ranks of Dareilian notables opened before them. A tall and strong-boned people, large eyes all the more arresting since the female nobility shaved their heads to various degrees: a code that signaled their position in the complicated hierarchy of highborns, according to Leia. Pale skin sculpted over the ridges of prominent bones, they were beautiful in the stark way of distant mountains. A backward glance revealed a select offworlder crowd near the portals, watching the proceedings like scarecrows at the doors to fortune city.

Together with Luke and Leia, Han brought up the rear as the delegation bowed past the ruler’s throne on the raised dais. Bald except for a single skein of long braids, she projected ageless authority. The kind of look state-kept artists struggled to engrave on the statues of mortal despots. The smile on her chiseled features was aimed exclusively at Luke.

“Dareil welcomes the Chosen One whose coming has been long foretold by the wise,” she said in a deep, scratchy voice.

Luke bent his head. “It isn’t for me to say whether I deserve that designation.”

“Ah, but you do.” The ruler stepped down from the dais, and a sudden hush fell. From her impressive height of six foot-something, she smiled down at Luke and raised a beringed hand to his chin. Han just barely stopped himself from bristling. Whaddaya know, it might be the local version of a curtsey.

“General.” The ruler’s glance brushed up and down his frame with calm directness before it swept on to Leia. “Your Highness. It is an honor.”

“D’haya.” Leia touched three fingertips to her forehead, easily adopting local customs like she’d spent years at this cloistered court. “The air is sweeter in your presence.”

All the honors done and dispensed with, the crowds disintegrated again into the usual milling disorder.

“Wanna bet she’s got a couple eligible daughters?” Han murmured.

“I’m sure she does.” A restrained smile touched the corners of Luke’s mouth.

“Han Solo?” asked a voice he didn’t recognize.

He swung back to face a young man from the Corellian group. Chubby-faced, in his twenties. “Yeah. And who are you?”

“Joram Plastedd.” The young man glowered at him from brown eyes, his voice dropping to a mean-street mutter. “I’ve waited a long time to meet the man who killed my father.”

Several possible answers collided and blanked each other out. Han’s mind made a sally into localized amnesia, and by the time he’d connected the name to a place and an ugly memory, they were being herded into the banqueting hall, and all attending offworlders had to hang back at the doors.

Luke’s hand was on his arm, guiding him back to the present. Right before them, long tables buckled under the sheer amount of food that could’ve stopped a famine on some hapless outworld. Han felt his stomach shrink to the size of a fist.

“You know him?” Luke asked under his breath.

He remembered to shake his head. “Not him. But I knew his father.”

* * *

Another complication waltzing in to join the club: wonders never ceased. Hands jammed into his pockets, Han paced the expanse of their suite’s voluptuous lounge. A shared suite with separate bedrooms, yet both beds big enough for two: the place had diplomatic compromise scrawled all over it. Han gave a glare to the tasteful collection of crystalware on one of the side tables. Had to happen, he told himself. Sooner or later, scraps from his checkered past had to come floating to the surface, though the timing couldn’t have been much worse.

“I shot him,” he said curtly, pulling to a halt by the lefthand bedroom door. “In a bar with a bad reputation on Nar Shaddaa, and in self-defense.”

“And his son was present?” From a chair by the window, Luke considered the situation. Calm, collected, only the tight set of his jaw betraying tension.

“The place was crowded.” Han rubbed the bridge of his nose, though that sure wouldn’t add focus to his hazy recollection. “This was twelve years ago, and the guy ― Joram ― couldn’t’ve been more than a teenager. I don’t remember seeing him.”

“What happened?”

“I’d passed an ammo shipment on to Plastedd, mostly detonator components. We were in a rush for some other cargo and didn’t check the stuff out properly. Either that, or our scanners weren’t up to scratch.” Han glanced at the wall and waited for the man’s features to rise like a pontoon on the tide of second thoughts. “The cargo hold of Plastedd’s freighter blew while they were still docked, and his partner got killed in the explosion. He came after me to Nar Shaddaa. Couldn’t blame him for blaming me, but he thought I’d fixed him with a primed charge on purpose, to kick him out of the business.”

“And he tried to shoot you?”

“He came at me with a knife.”

That part of the memory stood out sharp and bright, etched into Han’s mind with the chills of alarm and instinct. Steel glitter swerving from a blurry backdrop, the crowd of onlookers scattering at quarter speed, like fall leaves sailing into shadowed corners.

“And that’s all. I pulled the trigger.”

Luke’s eyes followed him as he whipped past the fragile furniture and dropped into a chair just to keep himself from breaking something.

“I’d no idea...” Han threw up a hand with pointless, angry regret. “Maybe I shouldn’t’ve come.”

“How could you know?” Agitation conquered the weariness on Luke’s face as he sat forward. “I don’t like this. We need to find out what Joram’s intentions are.”

“Oh, I can guess. He’s Corellian.” A number of jaded old saws rolled through Han’s mind, one of them claiming that Corellians never forgot a slight. “It’s a matter of family honor.”

“Even though his father was a spacer, not a home-bound clan chief?” Luke asked. “Han, we’ll have to do something about this. Perhaps you could make him understand what happened.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Han scrubbed his knuckles across his chin. “Maybe I should try talkin’ to him,” he added without much confidence. He glanced around, and flawless elegance smiled back at him with teeth of latinum and brass.

Like as not, he’d made a mistake hoping that anything could be resolved in the middle of major political brain-twisting. And it looked like he’d been assigned the part of troublesome accessory, adding to the pressures that came bearing down on Luke.

“How come you always believe me?” he asked testily. There’d been times when he’d thought himself capable of pretty much anything, close enough to deserve the mercenary tag. “I could’ve dropped Plastedd in cold blood―”

“You could never do such a thing.” Luke didn’t raise his voice. “I know you.”

Sometimes it was unnerving to be known and predicted in such a way, with that utter, unshakable clarity. Some ingrained reflex reared in protest, and Han recalled times when he’d shed skins and switched IDs like he changed his clothes. The safety of it.

He wrapped a hand around the chair’s polished armrest, seizing another question to him like a threadbare defense. “What’s all this about a Chosen One?”

Something close to a jolt passed through Luke’s frame. “It refers to an ancient prophecy.”

“So I gather.” Watching him, Han let reflection run its course until Luke broke his silence.

“ _The Chosen One who’ll restore balance to the Force_ ,” he quoted. “I’ve come across references in several different sources, but it seems that the masters of the old order never quite agreed on what it means.” His glance grew restless, searching around the room for some promising clue. “At one time, some thought that Anakin might be the Chosen One. My father.”

“And you don’t want to think it could be you,” Han guessed.

“Maybe I don’t want to shoulder _that_ responsibility.” With the blunt admission, a last layer of discipline frayed. Luke let his head sag against the chair’s padded backrest.

Han pushed from his seat to cross over and leaned in for a swift scrutiny. “You’re out on your feet. What’ve you been doin’ to yourself lately, huh?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary.” Luke mustered a smile that betrayed the effort.

“Yeah, I was afraid you’d say that.” With a shake of the head, Han reached for his shoulder, probed at taut muscle. “You should be in bed.”

“I’ve heard that before...” A touch of humor entered Luke’s tone, and his eyes focused on Han with the kind of glow that made his skin tingle.

“Keep that up,” Han grumbled, “and I can’t guarantee you’ll get your needed rest.”

“Keep what up?” Something leapt like flashfire in Luke’s glance, burning on the nervous energy of constant exertion and little sleep.

Han hauled him to his feet, with no intention other than kindling that spark when he crushed their mouths together. Thoughts losing shape and coherence at the smooth fit of their bodies, the firm grip of Luke’s hand on his waist, around his neck, and they were kissing ‘til heated, jittery pleasure leapt through every nerve.

“Maybe I’m not so tired after all,” Luke murmured against his mouth.

Out of breath, Han shook his head. “Nice try.”

From the back of his mind, that put-off _talk_ pricked for attention, but to hell with it, Luke was too wiped out to explain anything now.

“Han...” A hand came to rest along the side of his face. “Nothing’s changed. I just wish...”

“Yeah.” Han turned his face, brushing his mouth against the warm hollow of Luke’s palm. All kinds of fevered notions swarmed in his gut and got locked down, thwarted. At least the old magnetism had lost none of its power.

 

Sleep caught up with Luke in minutes. Han dimmed all the lights and stretched out next to him. Replayed the evening’s mixed events in his head, if only to bring his body back in line. But those memories thinned out in the dark and slunk back to join the last three weeks. A stretch of time he’d passed somehow, but hadn’t lived. Not by any definition that mattered.

The biggest mark of change, that. Silence ticking at the back of his head, like an indicator pointing out a hull breach. Draining Luke’s presence away, the connection he’d relied on ever since —

Kashyyyk. The memory rushed Han with a different darkness, with the tricky rustles and crackles of dense forests. Scraps of muted silver slipping from layer to layer, through the canopy of wroshyr trees that formed a living sky. Dim green depths above and stars glittering below, caught in the crochet of foliage and shadows.

They’d joined Chewbacca for one of the night-hunts on his homeworld, stalking a predator down a webwork of branches and swinging walkways. Lightheaded from the thin, cold air of incredible heights.

Until something flashed in Han’s mind — all-out alarm dazzling with the strangest thrill — and threw him to the side. Like a call that split time itself. Luke’s breath and voice by his ear, Luke’s frame beside him like a blood-hot shadow — and a huge, furry shape leapt past him with lethal grace. Spots of dark silver gleaming from a black pelt. Next, Chewbacca’s arrow quivered in the taut flank, breaking the soundless attack. Splinters of fact, and an alien force of sensation twisting through Han’s middle. Luke wasn’t anywhere near him.

Flattened against the trunk of a mammoth tree, Han stared hard at a reconfigured reality. The rest of his senses might disagree, but he could still taste and feel and touch Luke’s presence inside him. The warning that’d _zip-bang_ pierced the privacy of his mind and yanked him back from danger. And he’d turned in the right direction too, before Luke’s slender frame melted out of the dark.

_Han? Are you — everything all right?_

He shook his head. _Far better’n that_.

There’d been moments like this before, sliding and unfolding beneath the surface of awareness. Something had been at work for months, weaving some arcane connection between them. Right then, it felt like hitting on what he’d known all along.

_How the hell d’you do that?_

_I don’t_ , Luke answered him, and a soft laugh spilled out, amazed. _It happens through the Force, it’s simply... growing between us_.

Across the distance of months, Han could still trace the impact like a plasma trail stitched across the inside of his skin. Something that could’ve felt invasive, alien, might’ve raised every bristling inner shield he possessed — but didn’t. Not a twitch of resistance there, just slivers of sensation falling into place. Just Luke, and the scents of ancient wood, smoke and resin through the long hours of night. To this day, he could smell them. Wrapped round the taste of fever-flushed skin, the pure, blazing joy that spread through, from a source outside of himself.

No need to have the mechanics spelled out either, he could feel the physical reality like his own body’s rhythms. Immediate like electric current, weightless like the shadowplay across bare skin. He’d never been this close to anyone, and during that endless night, it felt like falling upwards into another sky, all boundaries burned up in the rush of giving and taking, same difference, all one.

And there it was, a mind-link out of nowhere, like the Force itself had stooped to approve their relationship. What they shared was addictive like the sweetest drug.

Alone in the bedroom’s diluted dark, Han curled one hand into the sheet and listened to Luke’s deep, even breath. Missing its echoes, a fine surf inside his own chest. For a season and a half, he’d grown used to that extended, collateral sense that included Luke, like a modified radar. There’d been moments when he could pick up the slightest flicker of reaction, moments when Luke gave him answers to questions he hadn’t quite thought of yet. Spooked him, occasionally. Because unlike any radar, it worked both ways, and Luke’s thoughtless, absolute trust was something else again. The way he laid himself open. A dangerous flaw, at least to the Corellian street kid who’d played fast and loose to put a distance between himself and the suburban bog waiting to swallow all sentient trash.

Han’s insides tightened up in reflex. That part took some getting used to, all right. Not that he wouldn’t trust Luke with his life and more, he’d just always kept his soft spots barred from sight. A survival instinct that belonged to the past, nothing but a petty habit now, and past due. No reason not to take the plunge, was there?

 _It felt right, always did_ , Han thought mutinously, still much too awake. _Brooding about it won’t change a thing_. The Force and the whole fusty Jedi elite with their teachings could go hang, this was _his_ by rights, one of the few possessions he’d ever allowed himself.

From the window, distant runlights snapped off pale flickers that zigzagged over fittings and tapestries and died in a dark corner. Much closer, Luke’s presence filled the air around him, an intangible shield. Too close for denial, too far for comfort. A jammed channel buzzing with energy that no longer went anywhere.

Maybe Luke’s concerns, his own bull-headed response, or some quirk in the Force itself had plugged it up. But whatever the cause, this ominous silence inside his own head felt goddamn unnatural now. Han shifted uneasily. Dimness revealed the contours of Luke’s face like a secret. When he leaned over, Luke raised a hand, fumbling for contact from the middle of sleep.

Han reached back thinking that everything ― absolutely everything ― was riding on trust now. And that maybe, if he let himself consider it, that should scare him.

* * * * *

Thready gray light crept into the room when Luke opened his eyes. Too much of his mind still wrapped in sleep to provide names, locations or the day’s agenda; the rest of it diffused along his skin, into generous, familiar warmth. In the course of the night, he’d eased back into fond habit and spooned up close behind Han.

He let his eyes slip shut again, retreating into the warm dark that slid through every part of his body ― fingertips, stomach, throat ― with a flurried pulse. Starting to beat double time wherever he touched Han. The jut of a shoulder blade against his chest, the light pressure of Han’s back and thigh. When his fingers moved in aimless patterns down Han’s arm, an open hand turned beneath his and gripped back with instant alertness.

“G’morning...” Han turned over slowly, careful not to dislodge Luke’s arm across his midriff. The line of his mouth softened by sleep, hazel eyes watchful in a way that didn’t mesh with any recall of waking up together.

“Sleep well?” Luke worked his tongue around the words that still came out blurry.

“Caught a couple winks eventually.” Han shrugged one shoulder. But the rest of the night had carved thin creases around his eyes and strained at him now. “It’s just,” he started. “We’re still... out of sync. I don’t like it, but I haven’t a clue what to do about it.” Intractable energy pressing to the surface that snapped Luke wide awake.

“I know,” he managed. _I owe you more answers than I’ve got_.

“And _I_ know you worry about messing with my freedom of choice,” Han returned, cutting straight to the point, “but stewing over it won’t fix that either. Anything helpful come up while I was off sulking?”

The forced note of humor didn’t catch. Through seconds of silence, Luke curbed a sweep of apprehensions. Since Han’s last-minute return, they’d sidestepped this conversation, keeping it trapped in ambivalence that surrounded Han like a force field.

“There’s nothing more concrete in the sources that I’ve studied,” he said slowly. “A life-bond is a _life_ -bond, it all comes down to that.” He ran his hand up to Han’s shoulder, for a hold in the middle of something so unsettled. Too many half-formed questions turning in the air between them. “Once this... happens, it will be irreversible.” And he could feel Han’s instant reaction, a defensive impulse that fell against him with a subtle, mounting pressure.

“Yeah, you keep telling me I can’t be absolutely certain,” Luke went on fast, “but what if I’m right? Our entire future’s at stake. We need to be _sure_ ―”

“And second-guess things that might happen ten years from now?” Han cut in. “Effects before we hit on the cause? How?”

“There won’t be any rational solution for this. Only the truth.”

“Truth,” Han echoed and made it sound like a volatile substance, a contaminant. Ready as he always was to immerse himself in unknowns, if they involved precarious missions or system upgrades aboard the Falcon, he backed away from this. “How do you even _know_ what’s goin’ to happen, what it’s gonna be like?”

“I can sense it,” Luke answered, reaching hard for a translation, something concrete, “like... Like when you’re working on a single circuit, and the whole hyperdrive matrix is right there in your mind.”

“Why, thanks for dumbing it down.” Han snorted. “The difference being that I’ve _seen_ schematics of the hyperdrive matrix in the manuals.”

“Yes, that’s the point exactly.” Tension pushed up under Luke’s ribcage and spread from there. “And to make things worse, everything depends on your choice.”

“Worse, huh?” Han’s eyes narrowed, and he flicked up a hand. “How come?”

“Mine is already made,” Luke answered him with the double-edged truth. “I can’t stop it any more than I can stop loving you.”

A rash retort or a question faltered on Han’s mouth, and his glance dropped for a moment. He muttered something low and raspy, likely a curse, but when he looked up again, Luke’s throat tightened. Everything was laid bare on Han’s face, so much raw feeling that it stole his breath.

“Damn you, Luke — goddamnit, don’t you think—” With that, Han grabbed him close and let the rest of it slip into a brief, hard kiss.

“I don’t — I’m not—” was all Luke got out before their mouths met again, clung and shifted for a deeper angle.

It took no more than the draw of a breath, and all those mismatched feelings dissolved into passion, the kind that soared from a place beyond guard and reason, and grew reckless, grew urgent at lightspeed. A soft moan caught in Luke’s throat when Han’s tongue slipped into his mouth, swift shadow motion that played havoc with his pulse. Crinkles of the sheet caught between them, tangled legs pressed together as Han leaned over him, his ribcage marking a sharp line across Luke’s stomach.

He pressed back with no thought but to feel that strength, that weight on him again, his blood awash with a blend of memory and anticipation. He tilted his head into the kiss while long fingers raked through his hair and made their coaxing journey down across his ribs. Hands that had long discovered all his secrets and invented more at the same time, and he’d only have to name whatever he wanted ―

 _Everything_... One moment would decide everything.

It rose up inside him, a quicksilver tide reaching beyond desire, this need to feel Han’s mind surge beneath his touch. To pour all of himself into the slender link and join them fully.

 _Too much. You want too much_...

Luke took a hard breath, held it in, hands clenching to fists on Han’s shoulders. He could limit and restrain this. Isolate weeks condensed into solid focus, until control ran cold across the blind longing. Confined once more within the bounds of time and place.

“What’s up?” Han leaned back a little, flushed and ruffled and irresistible.

From the nightstand, the comlink whistled noxiously. Another hot curse took shape in Han’s eyes. He angled one arm backward to grab the comlink and pushed it at Luke without loosening his hold. The brief blister of an open channel drove into the quiet.

“Did I wake you?” Leia asked with brisk early-morning efficiency. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay.” Luke didn’t offer explanations when he heard the breathlessness in his own voice.

“The D’haya has asked for the two of us to come and see her in half an hour,” Leia continued. “The way she acted last night makes me think she has something of major importance to discuss with you.”

“I’ll be there.”

With more force than needed, Luke tossed the comlink down on the side of the bed and buried both hands in Han’s hair, leaning their foreheads together.

“Cold shower,” Han mouthed. “You go first.”

* * *

The ruler’s study was a monument to discreet design. Select trimmings signaled privacy against an impersonal backdrop. Three walls were dominated by bookcases that harbored volumes with cracked spines, united beneath a dust veil of years. Only the data console with its litter of tapes and printouts showed all the traces of frequent use.

“I understand your reservations towards me,” the D’haya said without preliminaries, her eyes shaded beneath the ridge of cranial bone. “I collaborated with the enemy.”

She didn’t offer them seats, to present them with well-planned honesty instead. Luke collected his thoughts with an effort, his mind still lagging several time parts behind, swiveled and scattered in a blaze of wanting.

“I hope you’ll understand that Dareil’s allegiance to the Empire was a matter of survival,” the D’haya said, “not inclination.” She wandered between the bulwarks of mummified knowledge as she spoke, pacing her admissions. “My government made this difficult choice after much debate, and in order to protect our own, we condoned the ruthless oppression and destruction of other cultures. I will not disavow my responsibility, but neither do I regret my decisions.” Her glance swung back, inviting reprobation. “Surely you would prefer if a new ruler presided over the negotiations. Someone with... a clean slate.”

“It is the New Republic’s policy not to interfere with strictly internal affairs of memberworlds,” Leia returned in a voice like shined marble. “Your choices are yours to live with.”

Without looking at her, Luke could sense the chill beneath Leia’s composure. “What happened to the Jedi who lived here?” he asked. “Dareil seems to have been their last refuge before the order fell apart.”

“And we sacrificed them, too, for the survival of our world,” the D’haya acknowledged, “but such was their express wish. We successfully concealed their numbers, so that the majority could escape before Imperial troops destroyed their enclave almost twenty years ago. And since such action was to be expected, the Jedi made arrangements to safeguard their immense archive from the Emperor’s grasp.”

Her words fell into tactical silence. Luke stifled the impulse to glance at the dust-gathering volumes.

“However you judge our choices,” the ruler said, “you must believe that my people always hoped for the Jedi to return.”

Luke inclined his head, her expectant gaze targeting him from the room’s soft twilight.

“Your father was a knight,” Leia said.

“Yes, but I did not inherit his gift. Under the circumstances, that was fortunate. The Emperor would have had me removed from the throne, had I been able to use the Force.”

“How could he be sure you weren’t?”

The D’haya smiled thinly. “Lord Vader was sent to interview me and assess my abilities.”

The memory cast a long shadow that doubled between her and Leia, striking through to a level below politics and verbal fencing. A mute exchange of anguish, sacrifice and the trained will to endure passed between them. The ruler turned to lift an emphatic glance at Luke. “The secret archive is yours to claim.”

With astute calculation, she’d offered him the kind of gift he couldn’t possibly refuse, counting on his need to learn, his desire to believe.

“How were these writings hidden from the Emperor?” Luke asked, though she’d surely anticipated every doubt and question he could voice.

“They were encrypted and translated into an ancient dialect, transcribed by hand and concealed among genealogical registers and necrologies,” the ruler answered. “They remained in the palace library and were retrieved after the Emperor’s demise. But the translation process is slow and difficult. My youngest daughter has developed a decryption program that assists with the task. She will meet you at the library tomorrow.”

Luke raised a hand in the proper gesture of gratitude. “I’d very much like to see them.”

The D’haya’s eyes were a deep shade of violet, full of restraint and curiosity as she watched him. “I believe you will find that some of these writings elucidate the ancient prophecy. They should serve you well in your task of rebuilding the order.”

 

They walked back through the long corridor that connected the state rooms to a sprawling array of guest suites, amplified echoes of their steps pattering down from the vaulted roof.

“Do you realize what this could mean?” Leia asked quietly. “Informal meetings with the ruler’s designated heir...”

Of course. Luke gave a stiff shrug. “It could be mere coincidence that she’s the one who’s in charge of translating the manuscripts.”

“Maybe.” A hint of wry humor disputed Leia’s concession. “But in case it isn’t, you’ve never turned down a better offer.”

In spite of everything, Luke smiled. “I’ll be careful.”

Leia sighed. “We need Dareil’s support,” she said bluntly, “more than we can possibly let on, though surely the D’haya... suspects. The New Republic’s future depends on strong allies.”

The future. A complex, mobile framework in Leia’s mind that kept shifting to accommodate contingencies at every turn. _It’s so much more_ , Luke wanted to tell her, but she’d already moved on to outline certain strategic advantages that would govern the negotiations.

 _Try to second-guess the future_ , Han’s voice wound into his thoughts, a too-vivid memory spiked with doubts, _and you’ll end up with a warped picture of the present, ‘cause you’re bogged down in maybes. So you can take leaps ahead through the Force? That just makes it worse_.

A paradox he couldn’t dispute. Couldn’t untangle either. For Han, the future was an open, iridescent horizon — and Luke still recalled how that felt, recalled it as clearly as his first X-wing ride, a mind-blanking, adrenaline-bright readiness. But there’d come a moment when time bent around him, striking through damp, heavy silence to whip the reality of dripping leaves and mud and aching muscles aside. _The future you will see_...

“You’re not listening,” Leia said tolerantly. “Maybe I just shouldn’t try to discuss business before breakfast.”

Luke needed a moment to refocus. Leaps ahead, or leaps backward, his relation to time was full of loops and shortcuts these days. “It’s not that.”

A good distance ahead of them, a crack of white daylight traversed the polished floor.

“And where were you just now?” Leia retracted the question with a swift touch to his arm. “Well, I can guess.”

“Dagobah,” Luke answered her anyway. No match for her guess, the flicker in Leia’s glance said, but no question followed, and they walked on in silence.

Dagobah, the beginning of so many things, but most of all a junction outside time. The future had set in too fast, every glimpse of it etched with an afterburn. Temporal splinters that burst up from a black node and cut through him. Harsh breath dragging in his chest, every nerve strung tight against the next jolt of agony. Taste of panic and sweat, and the fury of failure pressing up right behind. Only nothing of it belonged to him, and when he thought _Han!_ he never questioned how he knew, it was too real and close.

Cool prickles went out from Luke’s neck, down his arms, and faltered at the wrist of his right hand. His eyes traced dim reflections across the marble floor that shimmered like the sullen pools on Dagobah. Through the prismatic scraps of a thousand possible futures, he’d felt Han’s agony, and he’d reached back, a rogue instinct breaking through with a power that spanned lightyears. Initiating his worst mistake, in Yoda’s judgment. His failure.

Up ahead, the seam of light outlined a door left ajar in the atrium. Luke quickened his steps. He’d known that Yoda was right and still couldn’t choose differently. He’d hoped to return to the Rebel Alliance a fully trained Jedi and came back a cripple, raw to the bone with solved mysteries and disillusionment. But the hardest fall he’d ever taken had jarred something free, an instinct that kept stretching outward for the one connection it recognized.

 _Hope_ , Luke thought. _Destiny_. That split second on Dagobah had laid him bare to the full, dazzling potential, even if another year and a half had passed before reality caught up. _Han_. Impatience gained on Luke again and wound itself tighter. _I want you ― need you ― to be ready_. But it was nothing he could ever ask of Han.

“Would you mind telling me where we’re heading?” Leia asked, barely keeping up with his pace. “I didn’t realize you’re _that_ hungry. Oh.”

On the far side of the atrium, a door swung open, and outlawed daylight splashed in a broad river across the tiles. Han stood in the doorway. The sight of him caught at Luke with a swift pang, a spill of wild silver cutting past Han’s frame.

“Set to intercept us, I see,” Leia greeted him — and shot Luke a sidelong glance that said, _I should’ve guessed_.

“Intercept you with breakfast.” Han cocked an eyebrow. “And don’t tell me you had any.” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder, at a packing crate deposited on a stone seat. “I’ve brought everything they delivered to our rooms. Wouldn’t mind to get out of the gloom for a bit.”

“Me neither.” Luke brushed a hand down Han’s arm as he stepped through the door.

Morning played across the artful layout of an enclosed garden and steamed humidity off the grass, raising patches of pearly mist. Between trees showed silhouettes carved from gentle gray stone, uncertain like vagrants trapped in a frost. Han unloaded the crate’s contents on a bench behind some blue-leaved shrubs. Settling, he grabbed a mug, some grapes and a piece of flatcake. “Well, how’d it go?”

His gaze drifted while Luke recounted the D’haya’s admissions, but his frown was quick to form at the mention of the manuscripts.

“What if they’ve been fabricated to goad you?” he asked when Luke had finished.

“That’s very unlikely. Sooner or later, I’d be able to tell, and she must realize that. But of course she counts on me to be grateful.”

“Yeah. Let’s hope she’s at least subtle about it.” Han spread his arms along a backrest of withered stone and let his head fall back, baring his throat to the misty sunlight. At home in this place like any other, fitting himself into the picture with a casual sprawl. “Under the circumstances, I wouldn’t buy any no-strings-attached guarantee.”

That was a given. Luke’s glance strayed from the stone’s grainy surface to Han’s shoulder and throat, tension dormant in every muscle, and recollection quickened with a fine sting.

“She needs all the political support she can get,” Leia’s voice urged him back to reason. “And with this world’s history, you’re her best hope. She seems to have some favorite ideas about the new Jedi order as well.”

Han snorted. “Most every planetary government does. And most of ‘em don’t like the notion that Luke’s running his own show.”

“Including the High Council.” With familiar deftness, Leia had switched from surmise to hard political fact. “Mon Mothma asked me to reassure you of her complete faith in your abilities, but—”

“She’s worried,” Luke finished.

Leia met his eyes across the rim of her mug. “A little _startled_ by your recent decisions,” she amended. “Everyone expected you to hand-pick your future students.”

“And that’s how I thought I’d do it, at first.”

Through an alignment of pruned trees, he looked directly at one of the stone sculptures. A girl with a snake wrapped around her outstretched arm, the lines of limb and snake coils blurred by corrosive weather, an accidental hybrid. He shook his head.

“Where do you start a search like that? No matter where I went, the local government would’ve tried to influence my choices, manipulate the results — and whatever the outcome, it would have generated resentment from those who felt they’d been overlooked. The procedures themselves would have grown unmanageable.”

“Not to mention diplomatic repercussions,” Han threw in. “The Council might not like the way Luke’s handling things now, but if he’d gone and upset the first dozen swellheads who’d come running to kick up a fuss, they’d like it even less.”

“And the truth is,” Luke continued, “I can’t determine on sight whether someone’s got the right kind of potential. I need to get to know them, and they have to understand what they’re getting involved with. It takes time. If I’d conducted a search like that, it would have taken half a life.”

He caught Han’s charged glance, aimed at Leia with all the readiness to defend much-debated decisions.

“You should’ve seen your brother racking his brains for the right kind of solution. If the Council’s about to accuse him of taking the _easy_ way out―”

“It was _your_ idea,” Leia said abruptly, her sobriety wavering. “Wasn’t it? To put word about and let them come to Luke, anyone who believes they might be Force-sensitive?”

Startled out of annoyance, Han leaned back. “Not exactly.”

“Yes, it was,” Luke said almost simultaneously. “And it’s the most... equitable way we could think of. The fare’s paid for, so all they need to do is get in touch.”

“I would have thought you’d be overrun by applicants within weeks.”

“Seems like being a Jedi’s no longer such a popular fantasy,” Han muttered around a bite of flatcake.

“But what about security?” Leia persisted.

“They’re all routed through Corellia.” Han swiped some crumbs off his pants before he continued. “I’ve hired someone reliable to take care of transfers. Checks up on their background and agenda, and you can bet he’d beat the Imperial inquisition at constructive paranoia. If they check out clean, he sends them on.” A glint of amusement sparked and vanished in his eyes. “Next, Luke puts ‘em through the wringer. That cures all the head trips and the worst cases of hero worship much faster than you’d think. Some can hardly wait for a passage home.” He pulled up his shoulders, eloquent in his irreverence. “It works, for now.”

“But what about those who are simply trying to escape dysfunctional lives?” Leia snapped off a sideways glance at Luke. “Or, what if they find themselves unable to discard everything they’ve learned, everything they’ve wanted to be, to serve only the Force?”

Luke noted the slight stiffening of her backbone, a narrow track of resistance. Though Leia had rejected that path for good reasons, there were times when she questioned her own choice.

“I don’t have all the answers,” he said, “and I don’t want to plan too far ahead either. What I know is, not everyone with the potential will eventually become a Jedi, but they can still learn to use their abilities.” He thought about the nine he’d left to start a garden from burned soil. “We’re talking about years, Leia. Don’t expect results too soon.”

“It would still be helpful if you reported to the Council sometime.” She smoothed a hand across her hair. “They’ll have to understand that these issues can’t be resolved in the short term.”

Though his posture betrayed nothing, Luke could sense Han’s withdrawal from conversation. Growing distant the more their exchange angled towards a future that might not hold a place for him. A divide of time opening between them.

 _Or is it just me?_ Luke straightened and set his drained mug back into the crate.

“I’ll do that,” he promised mechanically.

“Good.” Leia swept a smile across the scattered remains of their breakfast. “We should get going. The Chief of Protocol has scheduled a tour of some places of interest for the entire delegation. Are you going to join us, Han?”

“And cheer while they rattle the family jewels? Sure.” Han aimed a grouchy stare at the sky. “I’ll just tag along.”

* * *

The Chief of Protocol had their itinerary framed like an educational racetrack. Smiling attendants hustled the visitors through a flowstone factory, a mining complex, an abandoned Imperial base in the process of being converted for civilian use, and the State Museum of Planetary History.

Luke paused under the shadow of a giant skeleton and reviewed glimpses of landscape. Basalt cliffs, spruce and pine beneath a glare of open sky. Another dive into the sheltering gloom had brought them here, where each excavated bone carried a number, assembled to match someone’s fantasy of a prehistoric beast. And where its heart might have been, show-cases glowed from within, enclosing fossilized insects in their capsules of quartz crystal.

Beside him, Han bent to peer at the filigree of broken feelers and veined wings, preserved in vitreous perfection.

“What’re we doin’ here?” he murmured. Through the crystal, refracted light captured his profile in amber.

Some steps to the side, General Madine and the Sullustian representative Tal Hakim traded pessimistic predictions about the coming talks. Dimness closed around them in a semblance of privacy.

“Just one more stop,” Luke replied in a lowered voice. The strange jagged lighting etched the lines of Han’s face into his mind like a diamond lacerating glass.

“Which is what?” Han straightened, responding to his fixed gaze with a touch of Luke’s upper arm. _What’re you lookin’ at?_ His lopsided smile developed slowly, broadcasting the thought.

 _You. Just you, all the time_.

“The shipyards.” Luke breathed out and lingered inside the moment as if he’d just discovered the traces of starvation in himself. Constant tension shifted through him, alerting every exposed nerve to Han’s presence. He had to watch himself.

“Sounds good.” Han trailed his fingers some inches down Luke’s arm. “And that it’s the last stop, too.”

Half an hour later, the convoy of darkly glazed hovercrafts released them into a cavernous hangar. Glimmering displays indicated a jostle of outmoded consoles along the walls.

“Shipyards...” Madine cast a sad, disbelieving stare at a half-finished framework that might yet evolve into a space-faring freighter. “That was _before_ the Empire. If this is the best they have, they’ll be forced to purchase vessels and technical services for years to come.”

“Which could prove to be a helpful incentive for the economy of several other star systems,” Leia countered.

Madine shook his head. “In theory,” he said with heavy emphasis. “Mark my words, they’ll expect discount rates and free access to all technological advancements as full members of the New Republic, and the profits will be negligible.”

Luke let his eyes roam. Close by the larval freighter, Han was talking to a group of coveralled techs. From the look of it, they were constructing a modular freighter with optional loading extensions.

Luke had just taken a step forward to take a closer look, when a comlink’s whistle pierced all the layers of noise. Over his shoulder, he saw the Chief of Protocol retreat into an alcove. Indicator lights fluttered restively across her bony hand as she listened to a sequence of tinny whispers.

“Leia,” Luke murmured, without a thought to spare for the sudden twinge of alarm.

“What is it?”

But the Chief was already coming towards them. “Your Highness, a word with you.” Her gesture beckoned for distance between them and the huddle of delegates. “I have unpleasant news,” she continued warily. “The High Prosecutor’s office has just informed me that one of our citizens has filed a serious charge against General Solo.”

They were within the ship’s skeletal shield perimeter now. Luke signaled to Han where he studied the cockpit’s interior layout.

“What kind of charge?” Leia asked sharply, her tone raising an interested glance from General Madine.

“Murder,” the Chief pronounced the word with dismay. “But I hear that the incident in question occurred several years ago.”

“Twelve years,” Luke said.

Han crossed towards them in quick, edgy strides.

“We do not wish to make an arrest,” the Chief started. Despite the chill temperatures, a thin film of sweat formed against her frontal bone ridge.

“Of course you must honor your laws,” Leia cut in, Madine still monitoring unobtrusively in the background. “I understand. Yet General Solo’s actions of years ago don’t come under your jurisdiction as long as he is a member of this delegation. If the charges appear to be warranted, a jury on Coruscant will review the case.” She waited until Han had joined them, targeting him with a quick, dirty look. “It’s within my rights as Minister of State to nominate members of the delegation on short notice. Diplomatic immunity will protect General Solo from prosecution unless the Council decides to revoke his diplomatic status.”

And that, given the state of affairs between Coruscant and Dareil, wasn’t likely to happen. Han said nothing, his face set into hard, unreadable lines.

“In that case, I apologize for the inconvenience, Your Highness.” The Chief bowed. “General. I shall inform the Prosecutor’s office accordingly.”

When she’d stepped aside, Han rubbed the ball of his thumb across his forehead. “Guess you’ve just spared me a lay-off in the local slammer,” he said grimly.

Leia accorded him a narrow smile. “We’ll all profit from your participation in the negotiations, no doubt. You’re an official member of the delegation now.”

“Yeah, and the rest of the troupe’s gonna be overjoyed.” Han shook his head. “You really think this is a good idea? I know next to nothing about any of the issues involved.”

“Luke received the official dossier and info tapes. I’m sure he’ll let you borrow them. Beyond that, you’ll just have to rely on your famous intuition.”

Leia turned, but Luke stopped the motion with a hand on her arm. “Thanks.”

“Fill me in later, okay?” And with another troubled look at Han, she launched herself towards the conclusion of their sightseeing tour.

“Should’ve guessed there was a catch to it,” Han said below his breath. “Nothing much comes without one these days.”

* * *

The lift cabin jittered on standby, a buzzing cubicle that sheltered their first private moment since dawn.

“’Least now we know what Joram’s up to.” Han slapped the controls with the punch reserved for recalcitrant equipment. “He wants payback all right, but he’s trying to get it through the legal channels like a righteous citizen.”

The cabin’s bronzed mirrors showed him Luke’s taut poise left, center and right. Determined not to let his frustration come to a boil, for all Han could tell.

At the central registry, they’d racked up Joram’s address and com code, along with the instructive fact that he’d married a Dareilian. His ticket to leveling charges against anyone outside the Corellian community, as it turned out. Only the wife could appeal to the High Prosecutor’s office directly, without the intercession of a native attorney. But either Joram wasn’t around to answer the com, or he plain didn’t want to. Han leaned into one of the cabin mirrors, its high polish laying a fine chill across his shoulders.

After several failed attempts to raise Plastedd, Luke and he had been waylaid and dragged off to dinner with an effusive gaggle of dignitaries. Several hours idled away with circumspect chitchat in the company of wide-eyed strangers. The evening was wasting towards night by now.

“Perhaps we should just drop by tomorrow,” Luke said after a pause. Liquid bronze reflections moved across his profile as he turned towards the lift doors. “Plastedd might be more approachable when you talk to him face to face.”

“Yeah, but what’m I gonna tell him?” Han punched the lift controls. “To say that I’m sorry’s hardly enough to turn his crank.”

“It’s worth a try.” It didn’t take access to any arcane Force channels to divine the worry that simmered rough and ready under Luke’s control.

The lift slowed to a stop, soft like a fine-tuned Gandeelian rickshaw, and Han swallowed another sarcastic quip. “Look, I’m _willing_ to try. I want this matter settled and out of our hair... whatever it takes.”

But meanwhile he’d bet his whole clutter of decorations that Madine was running off at the mouth, sharing with the rest of the delegation what the majority of Fleet Command had been rumbling for years. That Han Solo was a sleazy upstart bound to turn into a liability at the worst of times. Gutter smells never washed off completely, and all that. He could almost hear their gleeful dark mutters, the raking of old muck adding its unsubtle mark to the growing pressures.

As they walked towards their suite, past a cavalcade of marbled glowspheres, Luke carried himself with a telltale kind of alertness, shoulders squared under a constant weight. All emotional safeguards locked and online.

Han sucked in a long breath when they gained safely private grounds. _All right, now get him to relax... and hope to hell nothing gets in the way before we’ve set a few things straight_.

In the lounge, ambient lighting could be jacked up to levels matching the relative luster of a soggy day. Luke pulled the sleeveless tunic off his shirt, mussing his hair. Thin black silk sculpted his torso, shimmers in the fabric playing across the stretch of muscles in his back as he bent over the com console to check his message log.

For a few moments, Han watched him from the door. The tousle of blond hair, the graceful line of back and hip, the familiar black-and-golden contrast exerting its maverick spell.

When he pried himself from his post, it felt like he was entering an unstable zone, no longer secure in a partnership based on the field-tried confidence that they could handle anything together. 

He moved up behind Luke until their bodies touched, one hand roving across the silk runway down Luke’s back. A frisson of pure pleasure arcing for his gut when he felt the quick start of Luke’s response. Han pressed closer without hurry, easing one leg forward against Luke’s inner thigh, the slight rustle of cloth like a high-voltage crackle.

“Anything interesting?” He snaked a glance at the com display over Luke’s shoulder.

“Artoo sent a brief message,” Luke answered, his voice thickened and hoarse. “Everyone’s doing okay...”

“Yeah? And how do your Jedi aspirants like having a droid and a Wookiee for babysitters?”

No answer, but a helpless smile twitched at the corner of Luke’s mouth. Han bent his head, his lips against the back of Luke’s jaw, settling over quickened pulsebeats. He cradled the slim hips and increased the friction by another increment.

“Han...” The pressure of a half-smothered gasp was right behind his name as Luke straightened.

“I know, I know, I’m an awful distraction,” he muttered, unrepenting.

“You have _no_ idea.”

Luke turned and hauled him into a stormy kiss so fast that Han forgot to inhale first. He drew potent warmth from Luke’s mouth deep into his lungs, until they clung to each other with the mute fervor of refugees. Strange how this could still feel so galvanizing and raw, like getting high on pure oxygen.

“If that’s how it is,” Han said on a rough breath, “why don’t you lock the door, turn off the comlink, and let me take you to bed.”

 

Brocade cushions had been scattered artfully across the bed’s expanse, and there was no time now to remove the fancy clutter or pull back the covers. All he wanted was to get his arms around Luke and lose himself to scent, taste, touch. To the feel of Luke moving against him as they landed between brocade and quilted wool, wrapped around each other with the awkward urgency of teenagers. Tugging at clothes and pushing for instant closeness. Deep, hungry breaths enclosed them in a shifting quiet.

Han sank his fingers into tangled blond hair and had no real idea how to pace himself. The bleak essence of twenty-five days — twenty-seven by now, and counting — coupled with an unholy dose of impatience. When their mouths joined again, Luke’s arm hooked tight round his neck, a hotwired, crazy rush fired in his nerves and flipped him back to the beginning. To moments much like this that struck in the way of meteorites: unpredictable, hard, bright flares. Grabbing each other away from the tracks of duty and into crannies of stolen time, like they still couldn’t believe what was happening, a renegade kind of excitement coloring every touch.

Like now. His hands traveled under silk, between skin and warmed fabric, to flick the fasteners open from inside. Luke’s breath rising hard and uneven against his knuckles. And the sight of him — that burning, reckless look skipping free of restraint — got Han’s blood up as it always did. Too bad no one else ever got to see Luke like this, turned on and turned radiant, or — on second thought — not so bad, ‘cause otherwise Han might have to fight the rest of the galaxy over him. He raked his teeth down Luke’s throat, caught a hum of sound right there, between his lips, and pressed closer. A lush, dark haze closing in on his mind and spreading outward again in fractal patterns.

 _Withdrawal symptoms_ , Han thought, but Luke angled his thigh against his groin as if to reinforce the point. That sample of deliberate pressure went straight into Han’s cock, jolting him hard and sweet to the next level of anticipation.

“Can’t wait, huh?” He’d aimed this at himself more than Luke, but a gasp went out all the same when Luke pulled his head up ‘til their mouths hovered within an inch of touching.

“Han...” A raspy edge in Luke’s voice, and that tone struck low in his gut, too.

One hand framing Luke’s jaw, Han tipped his head back and responded with a teasing brush of lips — “uh-huh” — before he claimed Luke’s mouth for a deep, thorough kiss. “’S been too damned long...”

Yet talking took too much effort, and Luke’s hands down his back loosened a sweep of bristling electricity. A broken-off sound hitched in Han’s chest. All that wasted time had turned his body into a conductor of mercurial current, it felt like, and every sensation deflected wildly off the scale. So maybe they hadn’t untangled that goddamn, Force-begotten mess yet, but with that kind of power kicking loose between them, something was bound to come undone.

 _Oh yeah — bet it’s gonna be me_... Han skipped the next breath because Luke had reached for his hand and pulled it to his mouth, jotting heat-blips across his palm. Accelerated pulse raced from Han’s wrist to his fingertips, answering the flicker of Luke’s tongue across the soft skin between his fingers. His free hand slid up across the back of Luke’s thigh, gripping tight, found the push and start of a rhythm right there, in the tensing of sleek muscles. When Luke’s mouth closed around his thumb, teasing him with brief suction, he bit off a startled groan. Payback had to come in kind. His hand took a shortcut over to Luke’s groin, to cup and knead his straining length without a trace of finesse, but what the hell, it rocked Luke’s hips into his touch and made him gasp just as hard. Han drew his fingernails across Luke’s zippers before pulling them down, the tiny rasp sliding through his nerves like the thrill of something forbidden.

But despite his hot and ruffled state, Luke moved with quick purpose and dodged Han’s full-frontal approach to strip him in turn. With greater efficiency too, no surprise there. Han was still wrangling with too many layers of cloth when Luke laid his chest bare to the cool breath fanning from camouflaged air filters, and the touch of his lips, warm and close. Caught in that hot-cold interplay, Han arched his shoulders, his nipples tightening between Luke’s teeth. All the pent-up want sharpened to a knifepoint, and heated jolts snapped through his groin, but there was no way he could regain control now. Luke had already worked his pants down and strong fingers freed him, curled around him. Played him with expert timing.

Han gritted his teeth as every beat of blood lurched into the rhythm that drove his hips, the pace Luke set for him. Trapping him in his lack of patience, and about to beat him at his own game. “Luke, you—”

“Too much?” Possessive intent flashed in Luke’s eyes.

“You wish,” Han rasped and returned a grin like a challenge.

 _You need me_. It was what he’d been trying to prove, but it worked both ways — as it damn well should — and if Luke wanted _fast_ right now, that ought to suit him just fine. Han pulled his head down, a breathless, jagged sound rising up his throat just before their mouths met, and ― _gods_ — he couldn’t wait any longer: this wasn’t the time for anything sophisticated anyway.

Pants tangled around his thighs, he dragged Luke across himself. Both hands sliding over the curve of his buttocks to yank them into perfect alignment, pulsing hardness against his own, captured together in Luke’s hand. Heartbeat jamming his throat, his breaths came loud and ragged while his body strained harder, struggling up into mind-blinding friction. With every motion of Luke’s hips and hand, chills churned all over him ― and a white edge slipped away with abrupt speed. _Too fast_ , was the one thought clearing through the dazzle that swept his nerves and jangled every brain cell, hips already bucking with frantic urgency. Release ripped through him in long, violent waves, ripped a shout from his throat. Damn that he couldn’t put on the brakes when he needed to. His arms clamped like a vise around Luke’s chest.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Luke murmured against the hollow of his throat.

Thrums of exploded pleasure clogged in his body, like clouds hanging low over a parched horizon. Han slid his hand down to the spot between Luke’s shoulder blades where a strong heartbeat met his fingertips, reaching for a clear focus. He’d wanted to hold on longer. He felt strangely out of this, exposed, like he’d lost touch with something vital in himself.

“Just goes to show,” he started, but the rest faltered somewhere between his brain and his mouth when Luke raised a veiled glance at him. Blue eyes dark with need and scalding tenderness. A jarred emotion pushed to the surface and locked up in Han’s chest. Caught on that troubling notch of silence within.

When Luke dipped his head again, tasting the wetness on his belly, the feeling got worse for a moment. _It’s all that time apart_ , Han told himself, _nothing else_.

He got an elbow under himself and rolled them over, fingers skimming the taut plane of Luke’s stomach, toying briefly through dark golden groin curls. Hardness jutting up against the deliberate provocation of his palm. Luke bit his lip.

 _Yeah, you need me ― you need this. Let me show you how much_.

“What do you want?” He traced the rim of Luke’s ear with his tongue.

“Just...” Luke’s voice caught on desperate pressure.

Han gave up on merging random cues into meaning and fell back on blind instinct instead. His mouth pursued a hot trail down Luke’s belly, tracked the warm, welcoming scent of him and a thickening tension he could read like radar signals. But there’d been too many times when his own body recognized the same code and every sensation traveled through a thousand reflections, like a river running both ways. Times when it’d felt like being inside a mirage and figuring out how it worked. Nothing at all like this. Something cold wrenched at his gut.

Han paused. _You’re just strung out on all the useless what-ifs and worries, that’s why_.

When he looked up, Luke had pushed a cushion behind his neck, eyes glazed and unreadable, one hand anchored on Han’s shoulder.

He dived, guiding the hard length into his mouth, his tongue sliding and cresting over contained heat, returning pleasure with flicks and swirls that drew a raging vibrancy into the fine skin. He narrowed his mind down to gauging the level of arousal, building towards a steady tempo. He worked at it with a mechanical skill that challenged each tremor into another and another until Luke thrust up sharply, his own body a million miles behind. No longer a part of that intimate symmetry, no longer wired to the same power source. It gave him a different kind of chill.

When he glanced up again, Luke’s face was a mask ― no surrender, just a grimace of desperate control colliding with savage pleasure ― but he didn’t stop, Luke’s hand in his hair coaxing his head down to end this, and end it fast. Han felt the slight tremor where his forearm was braced across Luke’s thighs, a slowly rising quiver distant like the harsh breathing and the choked sounds drifting over him. A storm that spent itself elsewhere. Tight throbs of pulse, a shudder seizing Luke’s frame, and he filled Han’s mouth with a deep, breathless groan.

Over.

Han raised himself on his elbows, a reflex effort to haul himself out of vertigo. As if he’d dropped into midnight sky without a nav chart, lost sight of a lodestar that’d once burned under his own skin. He could spend all night rationalizing, and he’d still feel cheated.

 _Out of sync. Like I said_. He stared at Luke in his half-undressed, tantalizingly disheveled state. The short gap between them sizzled with white noise, like a jammed frequency. And the truth behind that analogy struck Han cold.

“It’s you,” he blurted, pushing to his knees, pushing away. “That damn silence in my head — _that_ didn’t happen by accident, you shut it down!” Anger was getting the better of him and scrambled his thinking. “The link. You know what I mean.”

Luke shook his head. “If I _knew_ how to shut it down—”

“C’mon,” Han flared, “don’t start splitting hairs with me! Call it whatever you like, but you’ve been holding me off like—”

“I had to,” Luke said, his voice raspy and strange. “And it feels all wrong, but things were moving ahead too fast. I was about to lose control.”

“Yeah, that’s a real worry,” Han said scathingly. “Gods forbid that you ever lose control over your feelings!”

Regret lashed back hard on the heels of that and stung him like he deserved. It’d taken Luke long enough, damnit, to unlock his deepest fears that still bound him to the murky core of Death Star Two, no matter that the thing had blown up four years ago.

“Look.” Han swept his hands out. “This is different, this is about us.”

But his riposte had made its mark precisely, and Luke’s expression was set into unrevealing lines. “And that’s why. If I let go completely...” A balled hand unclenched, fingers snapping open. “Anything could happen.”

Frustration churned high and bright in his eyes. He’d been holding back all this time, his own prisoner.

“You mean you’d _bond_ us, like... accidentally?” A crazed, affronted creature sat snarling in the pit of Han’s stomach. It took an effort to harness anger with practical sense. “How?”

“I could feel it...” Luke pulled away from his scrutiny and started to rearrange his clothes, the flush over his cheekbones at odds with all that discipline. “If I don’t stop myself, I’m going to tie you into this bond. We’ve got to be careful.”

“ _Careful_?” The word turned to cinders in Han’s mouth. “Like, get together for a quick bunk-up when the itch gets too bad and call the rest off? Don’t even think I’m gonna be manipulated like that!”

“You don’t understand!” He could see the pain blaze in Luke’s eyes, hard and clear. “It’s part of me... of what we are together, and I thought I could control it, but I can’t, not anymore!”

Han shoved away from the bed to straighten his pants, button up his shirt, every move a challenge flung in Luke’s face. “Then _don’t_ control, damnit! You keep saying this is about me, the things _I_ need.” He stopped to meet Luke’s eyes, all his guns loaded. “That ain’t how it looks from here. Tell me now that you really want a partner with an equal say in things. And if you do, how come my word doesn’t count?”

Luke had pulled up his knees, an imperfect defense. “How could you be my equal, if I just reeled you into this?”

“And you’re sure the idea doesn’t bother you, letting anyone get that close, all the time?” Han paused, hesitant to drag Luke across the wasted grounds of nightmare again. The fears that’d taken a long year’s route to confession. “Maybe you still think I’m gonna run into Vader’s shadow lurking somewhere in your head.”

Luke met the charge squarely, a great stillness in his eyes. “We’ve been over this before.”

“I’m askin’ you now.”

“There is no darkness. Not inside of me, not out there. It’s nothing but potential, our own disposition to make mistakes. I couldn’t train anyone if I wasn’t sure of that.”

That was one stumbling block struck off an open-ended list. “Then what?” Han asked. “Is it that you’re wondering about a time when you might wanna reconsider? When you’ll hit on someone more suitable?”

“How can you think that?” Luke’s voice had grown tight, the first cracks in his composure starting to show. “I’ve never―” He broke off with a cursory gesture. “What about you? Don’t _you_ ever wonder?”

“No,” Han shot back, “’cause I don’t work that way.” He paced, picking through a bristle of unasked questions, chasing thoughts into logical progression. “I just don’t get it,” he started again. “What exactly d’you want me to say? What else can we do, ‘xcept take a plunge and live with the consequences?”

“What if I _can’t_ live with them?” Luke retorted, a brittle edge in his voice. “If something happens to me — if there’s no time to sever the link, it could kill you. And that frightens me.”

That much made sense, and something scrabbled in Han’s chest, familiar and inevitable. Right behind the forced calm, Luke had to be frantic with worry and control and concern. All the same, sweating over ifs and maybes never amounted to more than guilt trips and headaches.

“Sure, I get that. But—” He flipped a hand up. “Way I see it, that’s just one more risk I’m taking. It’s the way we live ― ’s never been exactly safe.” Irritation ambushed him again, fueled by that shuttered look on Luke’s face. “And you wouldn’t worry if I had the Force, ain’t that how it is? You don’t have to protect me, I know what I’m doing!”

“Maybe what I can give you isn’t enough to make up for what you’ll lose,” Luke countered.

“That’s not how it’s felt so far. And if I ever wanted out―” Han shook his head. “Hell, if you’d put as much energy into it as you’re using to _stop_ this from happening, I’m sure you’d find a solution!”

“But the dangers would still be the same,” Luke insisted.

Stung by his solicitude, Han wheeled into the question. “Damnit, Luke, don’t you think that’s for me to judge?”

“Yes, and that’s all I’m asking.” Luke heaved an unsteady breath. “It’s now, Han, the future ― it starts here, with this. Can you imagine what that means, how much it’s going to affect everything? At least try to understand!”

When he stopped in front of the bed, Han could see a hard tremor in the hand Luke clutched around his knee. “How in hell’m I supposed to make a choice like that?”

“You have to face your own feelings,” Luke urged him. “Let them guide you. I know it’s possible, but I can’t tell you how...”

Han shook his head. “Sorry, but that’s too deep for me.”

Blue eyes probed him with a level gaze. Pure Jedi, enigmatic and uncompromising. “I think we belong together,” Luke said. “That it’s destiny. Does that scare you?”

“I think it’s an excuse for not looking too closely at your own motives.”

“I could feel it on Dagobah.”

“I like the idea that I’m in control of my life.”

“Yes, I know.” Luke turned his face to the shadows. “So do I.”

His softened tone announced another covert struggle and the kind of acceptance that scarred. Han caught his breath as if he’d been running a mile-high blockade and come away with nothing but bruises. He couldn’t stay any longer. Irrational resentment kept seething in his gut and demanded some space.

“I’m gettin’ out of here,” he said to the wall, too much dead weight gathering from protracted quiet. He didn’t have the nerve to look back.

Outside in the lounge, he paused again, too aware of the silence that’d wormed its way under his skin. Like something had flatlined inside him.

 _We could lose everything_.

Thin ice, he could feel it, with an instinct that always lit up brightly to the proximity of danger. And fear. Real and immediate, like a gravity distortion.

On impulse, Han reached for the option of a clean break. Get aboard the Falcon and blast clear of Dareilian space. On second thought, he scooped up the dossier and the tapes. The negotiations wouldn’t be put on hold just because General Frippin’ Solo had had a bad night.

* * * * *

  
**~ 3 ~**  


Meditation took the edge off Luke’s sleeplessness and kept the dark hours’ crawl at bay. The Force was a sea of echoes that rose and fell without pattern, without anchorage, battering the limits of his self. Moon-shadows traced an uncertain path across cold sheets, invasive as dreams.

An hour after dawn, a bashful knock on the door relieved him of his watch over empty rooms. Luke grabbed up his overcoat, far from recognizing his reflection in the wall-length mirror. Han had holed up aboard the Falcon, he knew, following old habit at times of trouble.

The library was part of a complex built into a mountain’s hollowed flank, a fortress of protected knowledge with a flowstone heart. The salvaged manuscripts had been transferred to underground chambers where large glowpanels took the place of windows, veiled squares that watched over a long row of data terminals. Every sound fell into a hush that stretched up the high walls.

Luke took his place in seclusion, among the faint smells of detergents and heated insulation. The read-out screen brightened into welcoming silver. He replied with a private password.

Minutes accumulated into hours as he paged through some recovered classics of philosophy that he recognized for the most part. No answers, none of the answers he needed. His mind buried between dried-out wisdoms like loose soil, slipping through the grid of precepts and interdicts. Among the warnings against all passion, a liberal hand had sketched alternatives.

... _but if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. Love one another, but make not a bond of love_.

He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, a dry ache building at the back of his throat. _I’ve tried. Gods, I’ve tried_. But the night before, something in him had nearly snapped. From longing to blind hunger, from passion to oblivion. _Han_ , he thought, _what do I have to do to make you see?_

“Sorry to be late,” a voice intruded from somewhere behind him, and he tensed, caught in the middle of distraction. He hadn’t heard anyone approach.

Features tightly composed, Luke swung his chair around. The lanky form in the doorway didn’t come anywhere near his diffuse expectations. The crown princess had to be younger than Leia when they’d first met. He rose from his seat. “Highness.”

The girl sent an imploring glance at the ceiling. “If you can manage, call me by my name.”

She had her mother’s eyes and spoke Basic with a lilting inflection. The traditional array of braids that fell from the unshaved side of her head was shot through with colorful beads.

From all the information he’d memorized, Luke pulled up a complete blank. “What is your name?”

“Kiéru. And you’re younger than I thought.”

He shrugged. “Call me Luke, if you like. I’m not all that comfortable with titles myself.”

“So...” Kiéru tilted her chin towards the monitor. “Does this promise to be a revelation?” There was a note of sarcasm in her voice, perhaps a defense against the pressures of propriety.

“It’s too early to say anything definite, but this is the only complete archive that survived the war. I’m sure I’ll learn much from it.” Luke wandered back to the console, preparing to field her questions. “Have you read any of these texts?”

She nodded. “Some, while we were decrypting them. But not all of it makes sense to me.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, the way they used to worry about power.” Kiéru pulled up a chair for herself and plunked into it with all the grace of a high-strung teenager. “It’s clear as moonshine that the Jedi could do so much more than the average sentient, but it seems like they spent half their time trying to hide or deny it. What’s the point?”

“It’s not about pretending that those abilities don’t exist,” Luke started to explain, recalling a time when he’d swung back and forth between exuberant pride and mortification. To be so different, so visible. But, just like Leia, Kiéru had been raised to live with permanent visibility. “Power comes with a responsibility,” he said. “You have to acknowledge and accept the difference without thinking that it makes you superior. It’s a fine line to walk.”

“But the Jedi lived apart. Nobody had access to their teachings except the people they chose, and their students spent all those years away from everything else. They didn’t mix with outsiders. So the _superior_ part was obvious, wouldn’t you say?” Kiéru wiggled pale, near-invisible eyebrows, pleased with her argument.

“And perhaps that was a mistake,” Luke answered. “Mysteries generate curiosity as much as resentment.”

Kiéru scowled, but her features smoothed out in seconds as if a much-repeated drill had come back to her. “Well, don’t let me keep you off your work.”

With that, she shoved wide sleeves up her bare arms, rubbing them, and leaned forward to study the screen. Settling in to stay.

Luke pulled up the next file and bent his concentration on the scroll of text, a succession of lofty issues, surface without substance. As she tried to follow his erratic reading, Kiéru’s sidelong glances gained in frequency. After a time, Luke turned towards her. “You’re not at ease. Do you mind if I ask why?”

“It’s — oh, Mother hopes that I’ll continue the great old tradition and choose a Jedi for a consort...” A thumb propped against her square chin, Kiéru eyed him with frank suspicion.

Caught off guard, Luke needed a moment to come up with a noncommittal reply. “I don’t think there’s anyone available to fill that part right now.”

“Good.” A grin spread on her face, as if that assertion made them conspirators against the regime of patronizing adults. “We’ll get along fine then.”

* * *

The first round of talks dragged like a Gamorrean’s ass on a bad day, even though the agenda featured nothing but trifles, a common warm-up routine to help the players get the hang of each other’s game. So far, it wasn’t doing the trick. In between expounding their positions, the two parties traded morose glares across an expanse of white marble. Han pasted on a look of laid-back unconcern and said nothing. Though he’d read up on the whole bag of sticklers, he was going to save his energies for some major issue.

Leia would’ve been proud if she’d seen him last night, poring over the dossier like a virgin recruit hoping to make the diplomatic A-team. Anything to swamp the mind, since that fine example of bureaucratic prose failed to do its usual job as a sure narcotic.

While the champions of squaredom faced off, Han mustered some tattered shreds of optimism and hoped that the mutual sulking was nothing but an overture. When the session ended, he made a quick exit, ignoring Leia’s attempt to snare his attention with one of those all-seeing, thoughtful looks. Last thing he needed right now was a third degree from someone who’d see through to the heart of trouble in record time.

Halfway to the outbound transport cabins, he changed direction on second thought. Better take the study tapes back to their quarters: Luke would need them to prepare for the sessions he was going to attend.

Han didn’t give himself any time to think until his hand hovered over the sensor lock. What if Luke had returned from the library in the meantime? _Right. Ain’t that why you’re here?_ Annoyed by the sudden catch in his breath, Han tapped the panel with more punch than required. Nothing moved in the suite except for the snowy folds of drapes across the air filters.

He set the tapes down on the desk and paused as if something had pulled his plug, a cold weight stealing up his spine. Right then, the com unit activated with an urgent hum, and the display flashed his name. Han thumbed the brightest key on the board. “Solo.”

“A call from Coruscant for you, sir,” the operator chirped.

“All right, I’ll take it.” While the channel clicked and scratched through several relays, Han ran a short-list through his head. He hadn’t been here in any official capacity until yesterday, and Fleet Command only ever used his service frequency.

“General Solo?”

The bubbling voice belonged to no face he knew. “Yeah,” Han returned with a sinking feeling, “who’s that?”

“Alagrid Tenhanar of the Coruscant News Network,” the cheerful meddler rattled off his introduction. Fresh from the academy for licensed bull-shooting, going by the sound of him. “It has been brought to our attention that certain allegations have been made against you, concerning the death of a Corellian citizen. Would you care to comment on that, sir?”

Not that. Not now. Han drew breath for a bunch of unquotable curses. The galactic grapevine had sure gone through an operations-speed update. And no bets who’d supplied the little sniffer with this funky bit of news. But commenting on the impressive range of some people’s slime trails couldn’t help his cause any.

“You guys are pretty fast to catch on,” Han stalled, managing to make it sound like a compliment.

“Thank you, sir,” the young man said blithely. “It’s our duty to provide the New Republic’s citizens with the freshest information possible. We take our mission as promoters of political education very seriously."

 _Yeah, I bet you do_. “I’m glad to hear that,” Han replied, infusing his tone with a measure of gruff candor. Why not cooperate for a change? If nothing else, it might throw those body-snatchers off balance. “Matter of fact, I think someone should look into the background of this whole affair. Though that’ll be a tough nut to crack.”

“I’m intrigued, General.”

“Well, we’re looking at something that happened twelve years ago,” Han went on in the tone of righteous concern, “and it involved the competition between two gun-running syndicates in the Hutts’ sector. Several independents got burned when those combos went for each other’s throat ― you still with me?”

“Yes, sir.” Tenhanar sounded a little breathless now.

“What it all comes down to is a clever set-up that led to the death of Drin Plastedd’s business partner,” Han continued mercilessly.

When he signed off, several minutes later, he’d supplied the reporter with a convolution of details and possibilities that would either stimulate some serious intell-gathering or mutate into another fantastic chapter of the ever-popular Unsolved Crimes program. Perhaps Hotshot Alagrid would even track down some eye witnesses from Nar Shaddaa, though Han thought it more likely that he’d collect a batch of obituaries.

He took himself to the door. Time to look in on Joram Plastedd for a friendly chat.

 

Between bleached ravines, hybrid architecture squatted in the afternoon sunlight, the profile of Corellian homesteads imposed on low-slung modesty. Some flitters buzzed lazily where the basalt cliffs glistened with mountain cold. Han checked the address on his printout. Some fifty meters down the road, he stopped in front of a neatly painted entrance.

He could still hear electronic chimes echo through the depth of the house when the outer door yanked open. Behind the dark screen door, Joram’s wife was a discolored silhouette. She leaned closer, her pinched features coming into view as if floating up from muddy waters.

“You’re Solo,” she said, a Corellian accent mingling strangely with the Dareilian lilt.

“That’s right.” Han tried a charming smile on her, though it was likely to bounce off. “And I’d like to talk to―”

“No.” Much as he’d expected, her eyes remained flat and hostile. “Joram won’t see you. He says he will speak to you before the judges.”

So they hadn’t been informed yet. Perhaps the Prosecutor’s office was trying to prevent spontaneous outbursts of imported vendetta.

Han shook his head. “There’ll be no trial. I was hoping we could settle the matter some other way. That’s why I’m here.”

“No trial? I don’t believe you.” She leaned back as if he might add random harassment to the list of his crimes. Her left hand moved independently, and before Han could get another word in, the door banged shut.

What a lame performance. And so much for keeping his mind on manageable business. Han rubbed the small of his back and in all honesty couldn’t blame her. A Corellian wife in her place would’ve fired the first run of disabling stun shots before bothering with the whys and wherefores. At least out in the old country.

Through the sunny sprawl of domestic tranquility, Han walked back to his airspeeder. At loose ends to a degree that he could feel a zero-gee sensation converge over his stomach while his glance traveled across sloping roofs, disconnected. A touch of something else broke his stride. A faint tingle at the back of his neck that made one hand twitch towards the blaster while his mind took off in the opposite direction.

“Luke.” He turned on the momentum of sheer instinct.

Between blanched cliffs and the sparkling sandy road, Luke was part of a still life, like a wanderer out of a desert. He leaned against Han’s speeder, his own craft parked a few meters away.

“I meant to be here earlier,” he said, watching Han with banked apprehension. “Did you see Plastedd?”

Han shook his head mechanically. “I don’t think anything could haul him out of his trench right now. The wife says he won’t talk to me.”

Something cramped insistently in the pit of his stomach, a resurgence of the last night’s strung-out blues. The short distance and the careful prevaricating made them courteous strangers, acting within a warped, parallel reality.

“Maybe he needs some time to cool off,” Luke suggested, sounding just as distracted. “Should I try―?”

“No, don’t worry, I’ll handle it.” What an unreal conversation. But the things he wanted to say somehow didn’t come. Han breathed in again when a halting smile found its way past Luke’s defenses.

“Then how about going for dinner somewhere?” Luke asked. “I’ve spent all day in the library.”

“And I’ve been cuffed to the conference table.” Han let a crooked grin come and loosen the coils of unease. “Daylight. I’m startin’ to feel like a mole. Can we eat somewhere outdoors?”

“Sure. I’ve seen several places like that on the way.”

“Okay, lead on.” Han jumped into his speeder, already reaching for the ignition. Nervous energy poured through him with the engine’s waking growl. “Last to come in’s paying.”

Luke slung him a grin that belonged to the hopper-race champion of Beggar’s Canyon. “I hope you’re carrying cash.”

Unreal. Within moments, their speeders shot across the ravines’ scraggy flanks. Luke threw his craft into reckless speed, releasing himself into the freedom of the ride. Wind lashed at Han across the front shield. He drew in gulps of chill, bitter air that prickled in his lungs, the rush of oxygen clearing his head.

So they’d run themselves into a dead end, too damn bad. Nothing now but to back off and start over, at a fresh set of coordinates.

 _Take nothing for granted_.

He’d been good at that, all those years ago, when he’d sailed under the loner’s flag of lawless independence. He could feel himself slide back into the attitude as he banked his speeder to the right, towards the crags guarding the inner city.

Several seconds ahead of him, Luke landed his flitter on one of the countless pads. Han had never cared less about a lost race.

“What is this place?” He waved a hand across the large, split-level structure that stretched up high against the mountain’s rugged incline.

“The central academy. The library isn’t too far from here.” Luke cast a brief glance around, his shoulders set into a taut line. Afternoon was wearing thin, a yellow haze eating into the sky.

They seated themselves on a terrace where a Bothan server was busy shining the table-tops. On their left, all the doors and windows had been thrown open to the gentler light, releasing billows of garbled music.

“The conservatory’s in that wing,” Luke said, tilting his head into the random drifts.

The Bothan’s eyes flashed with recognition and interest when he keyed their orders into his datapad. One more rumor budding to bear juicy fruit.

“I had a call from Coruscant today,” Han decided to say, once their plates had been set down before them with a flourish. “Some guy from the newsnet, wanting to know about the deal with Joram. Somebody must’ve tipped him off.”

Nothing much could turn Luke’s glance wintry with resentment, but this piece of news cooled his voice by several degrees. “We should tell Leia. If a member of the delegation’s passing information along to outsiders, she’ll have him over a barrel.”

Though the notion was appealing, Han shrugged. “What’s the point? It’s out, and it won’t be the last time somebody goes diggin’ for interesting dirt to throw at me.”

He speared another piece of fried topato with his fork and felt his appetite plummet. A weight of silence hanging between them.

“About last night...” he started. “It’s just that you caught me out. I thought we were gettin’ closer, and instead―” He broke off before the jarring chill could conjure itself one more time.

“If I’d expected it,” Luke said, his eyes focused elsewhere, “I never would have taken things so far.”

Han pushed his plate aside, discomfort creeping over him again. Brought up against a pivot that could turn into a crash. Or a desperate gamble. “So, it’s all or nothing now, huh?”

“I wish I could tell you something else.”

Through a set of open doors, Han could see a Dareilian player evoke complex tunes with every twist and weave of her empty hands. Music created by exact gestures that changed the currents in an electronic field. Disjointed magic.

“You’re looking for an answer I haven’t got yet,” Han said, “’cause I’ve never made that kind of decision before.” He paused, then dropped the words like hard sabacc chips on the table. “Let’s give it time ‘til the end of this mission.” He swallowed past something balky in his throat. “You okay with that?”

“Yes.”

He caught the note of throttled emotion in Luke’s voice, but with it Luke’s hand moved for his own, touching lightly. Han gripped back and forced all the confidence he could summon into a lopsided smile. _Take nothing for granted_.

The ripple of music flowed around them in lengthening waves, adding another layer to the fine tension as they sat like this, the sun’s low tide edging the table in copper. Holding hands in a public place like they never had before. And in retrospect, three years looked like so much borrowed time, wedged into the gaps between impersonal necessities. Never enough.

Han set his jaw. _One last chance. Nothing’s gonna beat us_. Dissevered thoughts skated along the surface of his mind, but all he could see was Luke. That candid, vulnerable look in his eyes before he averted his face.

Trapped. Trapped and caught within a demon loop that was slicing deeper with each round. Han could tell by the way his own chest went tight — and all because Luke was dead set on protecting _his_ freedom. What he wouldn’t do to break Luke out of that. Anything to stop the pain that churned underneath his control.

 _If it’s destiny_ , Han thought, _it’s bound to happen anyway, so why bother?_ Trouble was, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that. Afternoon struggled against the onset of dusk that dislodged every solid shape. _Don’t you know, it could be so easy_...

He ran two fingers across Luke’s wrist, under the sleeve of his tunic, and felt the fine hair raise at his caress. From memory of the last night flashed a possibility, abrupt and straightforward like a skyway. If he pushed Luke past the point of control, seduced him into surrender, the bond would become plain fact. All it took was the right time and place, and a rogue kind of thinking. And they’d finally get on with their lives.

Han shoved his chair back, blindsided by the resolution that slammed into place, Luke’s glance like heat on his skin.

“Where are you going?”

“Guess I’m not as hungry as I thought. I’m gonna camp aboard the Falcon for the time being.” He had to think this out carefully.

Luke rose in a fierce motion that brought them chest to chest. “Don’t go.”

“Don’t worry.” Han curved a hand around his neck and brushed their mouths together. Now that he had another option to chew over, breaking the brief contact wasn’t that hard anymore. Where Luke’s fingers delved into his jacket, frustration simmered close to the surface.

“I know,” Han murmured, touching whitened knuckles. “We shouldn’t.”

One last chance to sort things out. It cut across his mind like razor-wire.

Luke’s eyes followed him as he walked to his borrowed speeder. He could feel it as clearly as the staccato beats under his breastbone.

* * * * *

“Well done, General.”

All his scopes set to pick up fine shades of irony, Han turned back slowly. Leia had slipped through the closing lift doors, and nothing but friendly approval registered on her face.

“I mean it.” She added a smile for good measure. The cabin jogged upwards with a placid whirr. “It obviously takes contraband experience to imagine a way of working around those antiquated tax laws.”

Han rolled his shoulders, easing stiffness out of strung muscles. Another day consecrated to the gods of futility, chock-full of cautious hogwash and the shuffling of cards that never got dealt. “If the Dareilian government can’t negotiate on the tariff rates, why not use middlemen? So long as it works.”

“And it allows them to save face,” Leia agreed. “Nice job.”

Charming as it was to be appreciated, something about that accolade rang false and made Han feel itchy. The lift doors sprang apart and discharged them into a polished corridor.

Leia slowed her pace as they passed the dining hall. “You’re not going to eat?”

“Not here.” All the delegates would be heading this way and muddy the waters with another load of shop-talk. “Maybe later.”

“In that case, why don’t we take a walk in the garden?” Leia suggested with the same contrived cheer.

 _Here it comes_ , Han thought, but there was no help for it. Every excuse he could frame was going to look like a cop-out.

Outside, final ribbons of afternoon gold were tangled through the treetops and looped around the garden’s stone denizens, a dreamy kind of speculation gaining hold on those craggy faces. Felt like a blue moon had come and gone since they’d had breakfast here.

A step behind him, Leia said, “I saw Luke last night. He tried not to let it show, but...”

 _He’s hurting_. Han stopped in front of a weather-bitten statue, its original shape now a matter of pure guesswork. Could be anything from biped to beast or vegetable. A vegetable with squinched eyes, in that case.

“It’s about the bond, isn’t it?” Leia insisted.

And now he almost wished he was back at the confab or poking through his dinner under Madine’s watchful eye. “Luke told you about that?”

“Yes.” She inhaled slowly, most likely using the interval to fine-tune her approach. “Frankly, I was surprised. I suppose I never expected something like this to happen.”

“What, between a Jedi and a guy like me?” Stung, Han wheeled to face her.

Leia shook her head. “Han, please. I didn’t mean to imply―”

“Oh no?” He took a moment to slap his temper back into place. “Then let me tell you how it works. You must’ve seen Luke use the Force on people’s minds.”

“Once or twice.” Her expression grew uncomfortable and remote under his glare.

“Ever wonder how he can do that, when the other party isn’t Force-sensitive?” Han went on, not waiting for an answer. “Same as your basic transceiver array. Everybody’s got a latent capacity to receive signals like that.”

“Empathic abilities, you mean.”

“Whatever. In our case, Luke’s abilities work like a booster.” Han paused, aware that he’d reached the wobbly limits of metaphor. “In a way, it’s like sensitizing the brain to a certain wavelength. You learn to tune in and use it. ‘Til it works both ways.” He leaned back against the squint-eyed statue, waving a hand. “Ever tried to contact Luke through that link you’ve got?”

Leia nodded. “He taught me how to do that. My focusing skills aren’t a match for his, but Luke tells me he can compensate for the difference.”

“Yeah, exactly. Same thing. It’s like I’m broadcasting a weaker signal, and all he needs to do is boost the reception at his end.”

“I see.” She folded her arms, a sure sign that the cross-questioning was far from over. “But that’s not what I meant, Han. I was going to ask how it works for you personally.” A conciliatory smile wound up on the heels of that statement. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d be comfortable with something so... close and binding.”

“Why, _you_ should know what it’s like!” Han shot back. “It’s nowhere near the end of all privacy, you can control it and narrow it down like any other channel. You’re not in each other’s head all the time either. It’s just another way of keeping in touch.”

And more. Far too familiar with the way words and gestures could be twisted to match any purpose and expediency, he’d gone for the directness of it like a shot out of hell.

“And that’s all?” Leia probed.

Han gave a curt shake of the head. Anything beyond this point was too intimate for words, too thoroughly tangled up with the things burning at the heart of his own life. Besides, the twin-link between Luke and Leia had never come under scrutiny like this.

“I understand that this is a decision you need to consider carefully,” Leia said, relentlessly rational. “It involves far-reaching consequences for both of you, and Luke is already under a lot of pressure.”

“Like that’s news,” Han threw in.

“And it might get worse.”

“What’re you tryin’ to say?” he growled. “That I should back off to spare Luke more trouble? You think whatever happens between the two of us is gonna interfere with Luke training a fresh batch of Jedi for the Holy Republic? Or that people won’t listen to him anymore, if it turns out he’s partnered for good with a shady character like me?”

“That’s possible,” she said tersely, “even if it’s a completely irrational reaction. People will try to get to Luke through you. And you’ll be his weakness―”

“Thanks, I’ve been called worse names.”

“All I want is what’s best for Luke.”

“And that’s what?”

“You are,” Leia snapped, but her temper wilted as fast as it had flared. “Though I’ll admit I wasn’t too sure at first.” She hitched up one shoulder as if to cant something heavy aside.

“Let me guess,” Han picked up her cue. “’Cause I don’t do real commitments. ‘Cause I walk out on people when they need me the most, right?”

“Han...” Something like old grief flickered in Leia’s eyes. “Maybe that was part of it.”

Vivid as a sequence of snapshots that ranged from the battle of Endor to the taking of Coruscant, the past turned circles between them. Heated clashes alternating with teeth-gritting compromise as they tried to make ends meet. All those mismatched needs orbiting an unstable core of attraction and frustration.

“I don’t blame you,” Han said roughly. After six months of trying, he’d walked away from a hopeless patch-up job that drained Leia’s energies. Right when she needed them for bigger matters than fighting him over the nuggets of responsibility that he’d tucked away for emergency use. “You’ve got the Republic to rebuild, Luke’s got the Jedi knighthood. I don’t fit the picture.”

“That’s not true,” Leia contradicted him with quiet force. “You’re good for him. In fact, I could see that long before you got together, though of course I didn’t realize—”

“Works both ways,” Han cut in.

“And perhaps it works so well because Luke left you free to choose your own ways.”

Had to be everybody’s pet theory these days, that his obsession with freedom claimed top priority, no matter what. Han snorted. “Look, I’m not worried about getting tied down, it’s just—” He tossed up a hand. “Guess I’m out of my depth with all this Force business.”

“Who wouldn’t be?” Leia said softly.

Luke, of course. Except that he’d been side-slammed just as hard by this whole mess. Han let his shoulders sink.

“I think Luke needs you to find a way out of this dilemma,” Leia said in all sobriety, and reached a hand to his arm. “And I trust that you will.”

Stunned by her flat delivery, Han couldn’t meet her eyes. _‘Least I’ve got a plan_. A glittering _zing_ of unrest went all the way through him. High time to pour everything he had into cutting through this unholy knot.

“Thanks.” He cleared his throat, but it still came out sounding awkward. “For the vote of confidence.”

“You’re welcome.” Leia quirked a smile that took note of his unease. “And now... let’s talk about something less complicated.”

“Like the negotiations?” Han dredged up a short, sardonic grin and flopped down on one of the stone benches. If nothing else, he owed her a serious effort. “Sure, let’s talk business. What’s on your mind?”

* * *

The valley opened up before them in the shape of a serrated crater. “This is where it used to be,” Kiéru said, angling her glider downslope. “There used to be gardens, fruit trees, even a pool. Mother showed me the holos. Unbelievable, isn’t it?”

In the passenger seat beside her, Luke steeled himself. The image she’d conjured settled like fine ash over the bleak view ahead, but it was too late to turn back. Through the long hours of morning, Kiéru had viewed the documents with him, fidgeting at his spells of distraction. At noon break, she’d called him impossible and volunteered to take him to the former Jedi enclave.

“They left _nothing_ , nothing but―” Luke stopped himself. After so many years, had he expected anything else?

Between patches of dead soil and razed walls, the rocks’ blackened bones glared at them. Like creatures torched and shriveled by the fury that had driven this attack. Across the cliffs, Luke traced the phantom script of fires that’d swept the valley a lifetime ago.

Kiéru slowed the glider to a stop. Under heavily clouded sky she pushed her goggles up over her forehead. “Shall we take a look around?”

At the deepest point of the basin, scattered blocks and charred ridges suggested the layout of several buildings, a disjointed skeleton. Deeper shadows pooled in between like outposts of dusk. Luke ran his fingers across the stone’s rough grain, seizing its coolness against memory. The burned homestead on Tatooine, the loathing ―

He reached into recollection that lingered like smoke over the site, the signature of countless unfamiliar minds, and retrieved a sense of unbendable purpose, the feeling of love and seclusion laced with a fleeting scent of flowering trees. A sheltered universe of knowledge and confidence. And the loss of it swept him like a winter gale, shapeless and enormous, wheeling him towards the future. _It’s up to you, to rebuild this. All of it_.

A silent command, compounded from the consuming presence of the Force and all those past efforts. _What if it’s true, and you’re the Chosen One?_ taunted the voice of doubt. _How dare you refuse?_ But another part of him chafed at the secrecy enfolding this place. Even the skeletal walls still breathed it out, a sense of lofty isolation.

Luke glanced up at the cliffs, their pock-marked faces turned into the sinking light. And, for the moment, guardians of a different knowledge, a secret symmetry in the Force that eluded him.

“It must have been beautiful here,” Kiéru said as if to console him, arms wrapped around herself. With her brightly patterned tunic, she was dressed to scandalize the court.

“Yes.” He lowered himself on a scorch-marked stone and noticed something tensed-up and edgy in her posture. The hint of another purpose behind this unscheduled visit. “Is there something you want to ask me?”

Kiéru paced a small circle. “Would you train me, to become a Jedi?” she fired her question at point blank range. “You’ve created your own enclave now, haven’t you?”

“That’s true, but...” He hadn’t seen this coming. When he stretched his presence towards Kiéru, he found no spark of unfocused potential, but the talent could lie dormant, buried from conscious reach. And motives mattered far more than the scope of ability. “Is this what you want,” Luke asked back, “or is it because of the family tradition?”

“Both, I think.” Kiéru fingered the toxic-green beads that dangled from her neck. “My grandfather was a Jedi. And he got to see the whole galaxy, from Coruscant to the Rim. Everybody says I have the programmer’s gift from him.”

A familiar discontent surrounded her, the trackless energy of wanting something beyond grating routines and a life cast into secondhand molds. He could repeat Yoda’s warnings to Kiéru, and she wouldn’t believe a word. _Adventure, excitement, a Jedi craves not these things_...

“If I trained you, you’d be stuck for years on a small backwater, among commoners and offworlders,” Luke answered instead. “The training center I’ve started isn’t anything like this.”

Kiéru’s face fell, but she recovered with the resilience of dissenting teenagers. “You seem to do a lot of things differently. You don’t believe in tradition?”

“Too much has changed, and I can’t pretend otherwise. If you expect Jedi training to be just like the things you’ve read and heard―”

“But what if it’s my _destiny_?” she interrupted, quick to seize catchwords from the manuscripts to her defense.

 _Destiny_. A fresh memory settled over Luke, questioning him. _An excuse for not looking too closely at your own motives_. Han’s voice, edged with desperate anger.

“Destiny doesn’t mean something’s completely inevitable,” he said, fumbling for insight beyond the bounds of his strongest feeling. “It doesn’t mean there’s just one conceivable future... only that a certain chain of decisions and events creates a necessity.” He paused for breath. “And it’s not always easy to recognize. But there’ll be a time when you know. When you can sense it within yourself.”

Embedded at the center of his mind, belief spanned the years and the parsecs that stretched between here and Dagobah, between Han and himself. _We belong together_.

A beginning like a radiant beam slanting towards a resolution he still couldn’t fathom, falling into uncertain twilight. Out of that dimness crept a sense of betrayal. As if he’d cheated Han out of everything he wanted to give, by hanging on to doubt. _But I have to, or I’ll take far too much_...

Kiéru squinted her eyes, her entire face scrunched up in thought, when Luke’s comlink whistled into the stillness.

“Hey, Luke,” Han’s voice lashed at him, an impossible answer to the turn of his thoughts. It took his breath for a moment.

“I’m here.”

A short, puzzled silence. “And where exactly is _here_?” Han dismissed his own question before Luke could reply. “No matter. Think you can get away from the library tomorrow? They don’t need me for the afternoon session, and there’s something I wanna show you.”

At the periphery of Luke’s vision, Kiéru strolled off into a discreet distance. “Sure. I... Han, we have to talk.” He lowered his voice, struggling for level tones. “There’s so much I want to tell you, and I never seem to find the right words.”

“Same here.” Whatever tightened Han’s voice remained unsaid. “I’ll come round the library to pick you up, okay?”

“Okay.” Luke clipped the comlink back to his belt, pulse beating dry and hard in his throat. When he looked up, Kiéru watched over her shoulder.

“Can I ask you something personal?” She strode back quickly, her glance aimed like a gunsight. “I’ve been told about cultures where males consort with males and females with females, but that isn’t the case on Tatooine, is it?”

He shook his head.

“Then your choice isn’t guided by tradition,” she said in clear tones of disapproval. “I don’t understand.”

Abruptly tired of circumspection, Luke rose and walked around the broken foundations to look out across the barren enclosure like a landscape from his own mind.

“I had the Force, my responsibilities... my destiny. And it wasn’t enough,” he said. He breathed loneliness, a metallic cold sliding through his chest. _I don’t want to go back to that. I can’t_.

“I was talking to the ghosts of my dead teachers,” he continued. “I had so much to do, but I was empty of purpose... a real purpose, something that’s me, just me, in all this. Without Han, I don’t think I could have pieced it all together. To open up and be a part of life, to want the things that matter to me...” He broke off. He wasn’t talking to Kiéru at all, a virtual stranger. But he said it anyway. “None of this really explains it. I love him. That’s all.”

When he turned back, Kiéru eyed him critically. “And you don’t believe that every passion is dangerous?” she asked, cruel and innocent and curious. “That a Jedi knight should bond only with another Jedi?”

“No, I don’t believe that,” Luke returned with more vehemence than she deserved. “What about your own ancestors? Your grandfather married someone who wasn’t a Jedi.”

“But she was the D’haya!” Kiéru flared. “And it’s possible that the Force runs in my maternal family as well,” she added with less certainty. “People say my mother’s mother had the foresight. It’s only natural that I’ve inherited everything from them.”

A wild anxiety flitted through her gaze, and Luke recognized that, too. The hunger for something real among so many claims and possibilities. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right that this is about personal choices. Even if I could, I wouldn’t want to live only among Force-users. I don’t ever want to lose touch with the needs all sentient beings share.”

 _Or my own_. The thought loosened a curling warmth inside him, a slow wave of awareness and sensation. A knowledge that ran deeper with every touch of Han’s hands. _Can’t let it go_...

“It’s just so... new to me,” Kiéru answered, awkward in her attempt to compromise.

“I understand.” Luke found a smile for her and breathed cautiously. Something inside him was gaining critical mass. “Shall we go back now?”

* * * * *

When Han swerved his speeder to an impatient stop outside the library’s portals, Luke was already waiting. A slender silhouette beyond the swirls of dust, nervous tension in every move when he leapt down from a balustrade. Han felt a responsive flicker dart through his solar plexus.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.” Han leaned back and raked a long, single-minded look across him. “Wanna take the helm? I’ll give you directions.”

“Is that payback for the race you lost?” Luke flashed him a smile that struck out of the blue, like heat lightning.

Out of sensible answers for the moment, Han moved over into the passenger seat. That smile. A mere shimmer of all Luke was, a reflection of the mind that burned behind it. At moments like this, Han could feel its effect through to his bones, immediate and irresistible. Three years, or thirty, made no difference.

“Head out south,” he answered Luke’s quizzical glance. “Straight on ‘til we reach the first mountain range.”

The speeder zoomed off across the canyon, skating towards an ice-blue dome above the harsh crags and ridges. As they shot across a white plateau and into unrelieved wilderness, the engine’s hum settled its tune into Han’s body. His attention centered at the corner of his eye.

Next to him, Luke eased into racer mode with a casual grip on the controls. Taut intensity gathered into single-minded focus when he zigzagged the speeder through chance formations of wind-gouged rock. Not slowing down for a moment, every reflex fired by the reckless intuition that made him the pilot he was.

 _Reckless_. Yoda’s verdict, Han recalled with a sting of the old grudge. And when the damnable truth struck a short while later, Luke had taken that judgment to heart with an unhealthy dose of doubt. Turning himself inside out for the tracks of his father’s choices.

As late as a year after Endor, there’d been nights when his sleep ripped beneath the edge of transparent dreams. When he’d clutched his right hand over his face, desperate for the assurance of living skin. Fingers stiff and cold when Han pried them loose to shape different needs out of the crowding dark and charge them with his touch.

With time, all those phantom fears had opened to the light of a different understanding ― until Luke could embrace him with everything he had, the past included. But the taking never came so easy, always dragging a trail of second thoughts.

 _And nothing I can say’s gonna convince you_ , Han thought abruptly, the notion like a jab to his stomach. _Just_ take, _goddamnit, don’t ask_.

And that was the whole point of his plan. If Luke could let go for one crucial moment, they’d take a shortcut through all those looped-up questions and be done with it. Maybe destiny would choose to cooperate for a change, just for the fun of proving Han Solo wrong.

“There, just beyond that ridge,” he said, pointing.

The speeder dipped past an invisible border and entered his chosen arena. He glanced back at Luke. Thin mountain air sliced abruptly at his lungs. After sessions last night, he’d consulted a heap of maps before launching himself on a cross-country cruise, in a race against dusk. Driven to find the right kind of place, because he’d already promised Luke his own piece of the moon.

Daylight unscrambled the last night’s velvet and silver into wild, vibrant hues. All in one motion, Luke throttled the speeder, climbed out and took an impulsive step forward. One wide-eyed glance absorbing it all, the vivid interplay of color in the wide space before them. A ring of cliffs rising white as ice into the cobalt afternoon, the lake’s surface swallowing sky to resume in burnished green. Fire-spruce branches like a burning filigree against that backdrop, and pearlbrush casting its pale shadows across the water.

Han leaned back against the speeder’s chrome bodywork. The place was everything it’d promised to be, like something balanced on the edge of a dream. Flaring to life when Luke swung back, stunned delight in his eyes. “How did you know?”

“Know what?”

A startled laugh went up into windless air. “I didn’t tell you where I went yesterday,” Luke said. “This is so _alive_ and... untouched. Like no one’s ever been here before, never even looked at it.”

And before Han could breathe in, Luke was with him, arms thrown around his neck and shoulders, squeezing hard. The next moment, he’d taken off again with that whirlwind unrest and stormed down to the lakeshore as if he’d plunge right in. Leaving Han stuck between the lingering pressure of that fierce hug, and the emptiness of his arms. No matter, he’d covered more ground in seconds here than he had in days. Or weeks, like as not. Loose heat washed over his nape and shoulders as he grabbed blanket and hamper from the backseat.

“Care for a picnic?”

Luke watched him spread the blanket across the turf as if he’d dropped out of a different dimension.

“So tell me where you went yesterday,” Han prompted, arranging himself into a comfortable slouch.

“The former Jedi enclave, in a valley much like this...” In the transparent air, every line of Luke’s face was sharply cut, sunlight sparking bright pinpoints off his hair. “Well, long ago, it must have been like this. The Imperials left nothing but a burned waste.”

His reactions made abrupt sense, catching Han between distant anger and relief. “The girl took you there?”

Unfiltered sunlight crawled down from his shoulders and spread along his back as he listened to Luke’s account. So the D’haya’s daughter itched to dodge her royal duties in favor of the great Jedi adventure. A teenage rebel on the prowl for allies against the ruling codes of conduct. And a mother who’d bust a blood vessel if she knew...

“Nice groundwork for a number of diplomatic complications,” he commented.

“You could say that.”

The pained glance Luke threw him turned into a long, appraising look. Pieces of him pi-ned under glass. Han shifted somewhere between unease and a welcome tingle scooting across his skin.

“It’s beautiful here,” Luke said softly.

“Thought you might like it,” Han remembered to reply. The sheltered valley amassed warmth, daylight glancing back from the cliffs to pour around them like a shield.

 _This is it, reality_. He breathed in deep, all the rich, sweet scents prickling in his chest. _Just us, and a place where nothing interferes_. No endless line-up of contingencies, no _ifs_ and _buts_ strangling the life out of Luke either. Nothing to hold them back. In the quiet, Han could feel his own heartbeat rise up close under the skin. Primed and ready. He shrugged out of his shirt and reached for the canteen as if by some reversal of gravity the water’s coolness could rise into his head.

A small trickle spilled over his chin and throat and drew Luke’s eyes down the path it made on his skin. Han caught that raw look before a sweep of lashes screened it from view. _Gotcha_...

“You must be gettin’ hot.” He brushed his thumb over the dark fabric sculpting Luke’s shoulder, determined not to move too fast. Any brazen gesture, and those hair-trigger scruples would veer back into place, leaving him no chink.

Luke murmured, “Yeah, I’m—”, fingers already starting in on the fasteners.

“We could swim a few laps,” Han suggested while Luke wrangled the tunic over his head. “The water’s so clear, you can almost see to the bottom. No toxic weeds, and no tentacled survivors from the last ice age either, far as I know.”

Propped on his elbows, Luke stretched his legs, defenselessly relaxed. “Do I look scared to you?”

Han grinned. “Not for a farmboy who used to flinch from a bucketful of water.”

“At least one of us isn’t ashamed to admit he’s learned a few things,” Luke bantered back, silent laughter dancing in his eyes. Irresistible.

The lightened mood went straight to Han’s brain and canceled the next quip. His glance strayed across the smooth tan of Luke’s skin, scent and taste rising fast from memory, and headlong into his bloodstream. A sensation like a sundrift ― all spellbound rhythms and open sky ― sped up his pulse. Hell, this was every bit as bad as falling in love all over again.

 _Go slow_ , Han reminded himself. They’d barely entered Stage One of his plan, an overture calculated to remind Luke of forces beyond his control. He plucked a grass stalk out of the wiry tufts and traced its tip across Luke’s chest. From the wingcurve of ribs to the groove beneath the collarbone. “Something to eat?”

“Not right now.” Luke held himself motionless under the spidery probe, part of him still poised for flight. A muscle slanted in his throat when the slender blade feathered across his nipple.

Han’s mouth went dry. The moment jumped into crystal focus, like a starting shot in his blood. On the edge of something so goddamned vital, things could only be played out as a game. “That’s the trouble with you,” he said, aiming for a flippant tone. “You get so wrapped up in other things, you forget to grab what you need. And by the time you remember, it could be too late.”

Double meaning added up between each word; he could see frustration whip through Luke’s frame in a short, uncontrolled motion. Eyes narrowed at the sun, Han arched his shoulders into a lazy stretch. Let the primary blaze contrition from mind. He imagined Luke’s glance traveling the curve of his throat and chest.

“Time to get in the water and cool off,” he said finally, the wanton taste of success taunting at the back of his throat. “Been looking forward to it all day.”

He pulled off his boots and slowed down again when his hands went for his belt. If Luke needed him to strip down all the way, no problem, he’d deliver a show worth remembering. A short rustle on the side signaled a clipped motion. “What’s up,” he asked without glancing Luke’s way, “you’re not in the mood?”

“I’m—” A thoughtless smile melted off Luke’s face like manufactured snow when their eyes met again. Leashed energy crackling just beneath the surface. And something utterly electric pulsed low in Han’s gut. There was no mistaking the desire that clouded Luke’s gaze, undiminished and just as wrenching as his own. The moment pulled taut enough to snap at a breath.

It took no more than a quick lunge, and Luke was over him, pinned him to the blanket and pressed up against him with mute fervor. Mouth lowering, only a thought away. Han won a brief, dirty contest with an impulse to meet Luke halfway and baited him with a glance through lowered lashes instead.

The slow, gentle caress of Luke’s mouth against his own came like impossible rainfall out of a drained sky, a dazzling cadence invading his breath ― that first shared breath drawn out infinitely, spinning time into a loop. Then Han tilted his head and moved deeper into the joining, into the sweet, familiar taste and frissons of lawless pleasure. No bottling it up now. Luke’s hands were in his hair, the demands of his mouth threatening to skew Han’s focus. All those stifled energies converging in the kiss, and Luke’s rushed breath poured into him. A high-voltage sting snapped through his groin when he felt Luke push back, hard and ready, against his belly.

Through a glistening haze, Han ran his fingertips over the arch of Luke’s spine. At every rocking motion of Luke’s hips, the wanting swerved into tighter circles and wound delicious heat up through his center. Until he felt the violent tremor that passed under his hands and raised his head ― just in time to catch the storm warning in Luke’s eyes.

Luke wasn’t going to stop this time. Every defense breached, something had broken down inside him, laid him bare to a stark core of instinct. The next breath turned cold in Han’s lungs. Instead of liberation, desperate resistance tightened Luke’s face, passion tortured into something brittle and scalding.

 _You’ll be his weakness_. The sordid prediction cut at him like a wind shear and changed meaning midway. Worse. If he pushed any further, this moment would be carved from nothing but regret. He’d taken Luke’s strength and pried it apart just to prove that he could. His fingers moved clumsily over Luke’s cheekbone as he rolled them over and wrested himself away.

“Love you,” he murmured, the soft slide of Luke’s hair beneath his palm, the broken gasp against his mouth burning like grief. There was just one way out of this.

His own momentum took him right to the waterfront. He yanked his pants off in a hurry and dove in as if someone was drowning out there. Icy shrapnel sprayed up around him, seared every thought from his head and shriveled the mutinous heat at his groin. Brutal cold soaked through his makeshift resolve.

Now what? His arms milled through mechanical strokes, the drag of water no match for the dead weight in his chest. He was going under, and nothing but the cold kept him afloat.

Easy to put a name to the look he’d caught on Luke’s face. Loneliness, and endurance ― and all for his sake. The very feeling he’d attacked, like a barricade to be knocked down. Like he could just flatten the fear and leave every other feeling untouched. _Great work, Solo_. The cold was starting to clutch at his stomach. Adrift between arctic green water and sky and not going anywhere. Nowhere except back, to face the debris scattered on the beach.

When he pulled himself up on the rocky ledge, Luke hadn’t stirred. Without a word, Han dropped down on the blanket to dry, felt sunlight tighten his skin and sheet him in listless warmth. Time congealed, moving thick as plasma in a cooling engine coil.

“Thanks,” Luke said quietly. So he knew ― no surprise there.

“You’re crazy.” Han swallowed against the hoarseness in his voice, little good that it did. “I tried to... walk all over you, and you’re sayin’ thanks. Gotta work on that streak of self-denial, Luke.”

 _And maybe you love me too much_. But when Luke bent down over him, the mind-numbing loss shifted into something less clear.

“Thanks for letting go,” he said firmly.

His hand curved around Han’s shoulder, anchored him, and the intimacy in that touch took him unprepared. Like he’d gotten sunburned, and his skin flashed on a different brand of sensation. A start into something else. All the questions he’d never asked came out of their parking orbit, tumbling down like space junk.

 _Destiny_ , Han remembered. _I could feel it on Dagobah_.

He sat up, before the thought could be swamped again. “What happened on Dagobah?”

By some trick of the light, a greater clarity rose to Luke’s eyes. “That was the first time I could feel it in me... the ability to bond with someone. It was part of the vision, though Yoda never mentioned it.” He pulled up one shoulder, awkward like the adolescent he’d been. “It was you.”

The vision. Han remembered a curtailed, halting account, tailored to spare him a three-d recall. But, through whatever channels, Luke had picked up on the shockwave of torture, of being dropped into carbonite, and his own blind loyalty had lashed back at him, adding guilt over failure to the damage.

“I didn’t think about it at first,” Luke went on. “But when we’d escaped from Bespin, I had a lot of time. Yoda told me to open my mind, and this vision came so fast, I couldn’t brace for it. I could feel the things you and Leia were going through... and more. The way I reached back for you. It’s still the same feeling, only I didn’t recognize it then. The same connection.” The memory settled his expression into a steely kind of acceptance.

“But you didn’t think it would ever happen.”

Luke shook his head. “It didn’t really matter. You were trapped in the carbon freeze. Barely alive. All I could think was how to set you free.”

And that same logic was still operating between them, cogs and wheels that interlocked but didn’t join anything. Han seized on it without thought, a fleeting conjunction of purpose and feeling that finally made sense. “Set me free so I could make my own choices ― with or without you, right?”

“What else could I do?” Luke returned. “But two nights ago I came close to taking your life from you.” His voice wavered. “All of it. The life you’d have without me.”

It struck Han in that instant. Clear as a charge imbalance and so goddamn familiar. Luke would go to the far ends of hell to pull him out of some scrape or other, then stand back. Take someone’s life in your hands, just never claim it for yourself. Believe it’s meant to be, and let it go. But that knee-jerk response was a mutual trap, he could see that now. All those hard-edged moments when Luke’s survival had depended on him ― and for all his smartass rejoinders, he’d never for a moment believed that Luke owed him anything.

“I don’t care for a life without you, get that through your thick head,” Han returned without the usual heat. “And — minus all the Force-stuff — this is what generally happens when people hook up. You take responsibility for each other.” He scratched at his chin, thinking, _look who’s talking_... “So, what is it? You’re not ready for that?”

A sharp intake of breath faltered midway. “I’m ready to share it with you,” Luke said at length. “Whenever you are.”

So easy. Words like a framework of air and intent, raising a structure that could buckle at the displacement of a single prop.

“And it never felt... strange to you?” Han paused, startled by the note of retrograde unease; something he’d shouldered aside months ago. “That kind of closeness, I mean. Gives you an awful lot of insight into somebody’s... internal makeup.”

Luke faced him with a look of artless candor. “It takes time to open up and... adjust. I simply had a head start into this.”

 _The rest is up to you_ , Han figured what went unsaid, and that notion clued in other unknown variables. Other questions, assembling with an uncertainty he’d not encountered in himself before. Not among all the rational explanations and mechanical metaphors, or the small, ambivalent shocks like electricity inside his own mind.

“But how would I―” He stopped again. “You think it depends on nothing but my _wanting_ to — and then I’ll know what to do, ‘n _how_ to do it?”

“Any which way. It doesn’t matter.” A blend of anticipation and urgency in Luke’s answer, in his eyes. “I never meant to force you towards this choice. It’s just that since that vision, the future’s more alive for me. Closer. And I can’t ignore it.”

And for all that he was still wading through a slush of esoteric braindrag, something had eased the pressure in Han’s chest. Time ahead of him had never been more than a jumble of mixed odds and calculated risk. A crest of moments, when everything was riding on instinct and coordination, like the split-second maneuvers that could flip the Falcon to eternity. Time branching off into opposite directions. But that was a wartime view, and the opposite of death didn’t equal living by a long shot.

The future was a blank now, endless, amorphous potential that came at him with raw energy. He stared back at it and had never felt so unprotected in his life. This was it, the truth Luke had wanted him to face all along, charged with terror and longing and too many things in between.

The moment passed with Luke’s hand settling on his arm. A dependable horizon had just dropped out from under his feet, but from it came an odd, lightheaded confidence. Like he’d crossed an emotional equator of some sort.

“I know,” Han started, his voice rough, but it didn’t matter. “There’s some things you can give, but never take. ‘S only gonna work when we both get there at the same time.”

“Yes.” Something bright and exuberant washed across Luke’s face before he aimed his gaze at a neutral target. Refraining to interfere with Han’s freedom of choice, just like always. It didn’t bother him anymore.

The past half hour had taken them through a subtle shift of direction, so that now they were finally moving along parallel tracks. Han took a breath that spread shaky relief to the bottom of his chest.

 _What they say about parallels and infinity? Good enough for me_. It was going to be every bit like jumping to hyperspace without properly plotted coordinates.

He leaned sideways, placing his mouth against the nape of Luke’s neck where blond strands clung to the sweat-dampened skin.

“We’ll get past this,” he said, turning the words into a lazy caress.

When Luke flung his arms around him and their mouths met, the kiss unlocked the waiting and tasted of hope. All the volatile heat had gone, collapsed into the deep, slow burn of embers. Han closed his eyes and trusted himself to that unknown force.

* * *

A pale sunset fringed the mountains, setting pasty shimmers into the crags. Before he’d thought about it, Han tugged the steering lever and veered the speeder off their straight course.

“You want to try talking to Plastedd again.” No quizzical inflection in Luke’s voice, as if he’d read the intent before it prompted action.

“Yeah.” Han chewed on the impulse for a few moments longer. Hardly an attractive prospect, talking his way past the wife to bump heads with Joram, but loose threads had a habit of convoluting themselves into the most troublesome knots. And the whole affair kept chafing against his preference for slugging it out and settling the score. “I can’t pretend it never happened. He’s here, and I guess I owe him the whole story.”

“I hope he’ll listen,” Luke returned, sounding none too confident himself.

A short while later, Han parked the craft where he’d left it the last time. The past couple of hours lingered in his mind like something sealed under glass, shot through with sunlight sharding off the lake. Without looking at Luke, he could trace a quiet resonance between them. A respite, no solution yet, but enough to settle him. He climbed from the speeder and filled his chest with the soft evening air.

“I’ll be here.” Luke tilted his head with a smile. “Go.”

“Probably won’t take long.”

Mulling over the thin explanations he could offer, Han walked up to the Plastedd home where it huddled against the slate-gray ravine. A sullen light glimmered deep inside the front window, but when he rang the doorbell again, it echoed into silence.

Han stepped back and imagined a hissed argument between Joram and his spouse to pass the time. Maybe they were pulling straws over answering the door. When he glanced at the house on the right, curtains swung furtively back into place. If he kept this up, the neighborhood brigade might take him for a demented salesman. Somewhere close, footsteps scuttled into silence. The backyard, Han guessed, considering the narrow path between the rock and the shuttered homestead.

“Joram?” he called as he rounded the house, quashing the reflex that guided his hand to his blaster. “Come on, I’m only here to talk!”

And like an answer to his square proposal, something heavy and grunting fell on him from the rocky overhang.

They hit the ground together, tangling for a moment until the thud of pain in Han’s spine subsided. Joram’s attack was nine parts fury, the remaining element of strategy crude teen-gang stuff. Han thrust his legs up, dislodging Plastedd’s clench, and flipped them sideways into sharp-edged gravel.

“Damn you, Solo,” Joram grated, much too worked up to be impressed by his unfavorable position.

With a shove at his shoulders, Han gained his feet and took himself out of kicking range. At the corner of his eye registered two more upright defenders of Corellian family honor. Packing antique sidearms, for all the growing twilight revealed. So the neighborhood brigade had turned out some real warriors. And he’d walked into their bush-league trap like a cheerful idiot who’d finally bought all the crap about salvation through diplomacy.

“Hey, I’m here to talk it over,” he told them — just for the record — and lifted both hands away from his blaster. Waving a gun around could make this a lot more dangerous than it had to be. _So let the punches fly_... He figured he could get out of this with nothing worse than a few scratches.

Behind him, Joram scrambled noisily to his feet. Before him, two youthful avengers fell into overstrung combat stance. Han dodged the fist that came straight at him and landed a blow in the second guy’s stomach, pivoting just in time to sidestep Joram’s full-body tackle. Too bad that this move left his back unprotected, and the kidney punch he got for his neglect nearly sent him sprawling. Winded, Han caught himself, his back to the rock, flashing through diversionary tactics before he aimed his next swing.

Right then, a furious shout from the wannabe-bruisers announced that backup had joined the fray. Joram wheeled straight into Luke’s kick that struck him mid-thigh and would likely leave him limping for days. Han used the moment’s confusion to make a break for open space, complementing Luke’s next move with the thoughtless practice of years.

They’d gained the deserted street when a plasma discharge crisped a scorchline into the gravel and sand. Han lunged, colliding with Joram who’d just straightened back to shaky form.

Up on the ravine stood a gangly Dareilian with bright orange curls, a strange flare against the violet sky. He squeezed off one plasma burst after the next, a sturdy combat blaster raised in both fists like he’d arrived fresh from the shooting range.

While Han rolled and climbed back to his feet, the lightsaber’s grating hum joined the concert of angry noise. Luke flowed into effortless movement as he parried each shot, ricochets whistling back at flattened angles, striking spatters of heated shrapnel from the rock instead of hitting the sniper. They’d practiced together for months ― fast, ferocious interplay between blaster and ‘saber ― until Luke’s control extended to fractional degrees. Deflected bolts sprayed in a wide fan, whipping up warnings around the shooter.

A sequence of dry clicks spun Han back around. One of Joram’s friends was hefting an oldfashioned projectile weapon. Before he could swing the barrel to bear, Han had the blaster trained on his head, squaring his stance to cover Luke’s flank.

“Drop that gun!” he shouted over the whizz and crackle of rebounding bolts.

Next to him, Luke blocked another shot with a left-handed swipe and reached out with his right. The Dareilian’s blaster came sailing into it like an obedient remote. A couple of steps to the side, the geriatric gun hit the ground, flung aside in unceremonious haste.

“All right, party’s over.” Han lowered his blaster. “Can we talk now?”

“So you’ll sleep better?” Plastedd issued him another bullseye glare. “We figured you’d be back for another bleeding-heart act. Talk’s cheap, Solo!”

His friends edged closer to him, sullen and wary. Han secured his blaster and took a step forward. At his back, Luke snapped the lightsaber off.

“Listen to me,” he said in Corellian, but Joram cut him short in mid-sentence.

“No,” he snarled his refusal in Basic, barricaded behind untouchable memories and armed to the teeth with righteous aggression. “There’s nothing you could tell me that’d make a difference. I was there.”

“And saw what, exactly?”

“You shot him. And I’ll get you for that, one way or another.”

Han snorted. “Get real. You’ll only land yourself in trouble if you don’t watch it.”

No threat, just plain statement of fact. Luke and he had years of combat experience on Plastedd, and the brief demonstration just now should’ve brought that message home, but it looked like self-preservation played no part in Joram’s plan.

“Maybe,” he said, drawing his shoulders back as if all his Corellian ancestors had lined up to watch. “Better that than leave my father’s death unavenged. He was everything I had.”

Han studied him from narrowed eyes. Behind the melodramatic bravado festered a real feeling, and all the common sense in the universe wouldn’t reach deep enough to cure it. _Like cutting my throat’s gonna make it hurt less?_ Apologies would only stoke up the bitterness. “I didn’t want to kill him,” he said anyway. “Didn’t mean to, either.”

“Yeah, you’re just a bit too fast with your gun,” Plastedd sneered, leaning on one of his mute sidekicks to rub his thigh. “Don’t be too friggin’ sure of yourself. Own up to it and let’s find out how fast you draw these days.”

While his buddies muttered surly agreement, Han shook his head. “You suggestin’ some kind of shoot-out at dawn? Forget it.”

“So you’ll just go on hiding behind your Jedi bedboy, your brass badges and diplomatic immunity bullshit?”

Han curbed his temper with an effort. “Grow up and learn,” he snapped. “Then we’ll talk mutual terms of surrender.”

He could see resentment rankle in Joram’s face, the kind of unfocused rebellion that never went anywhere, and knew the feeling like the inside of the Falcon’s power core. Except that he’d changed sides a while ago. He was part of the System now, part of that nebulous conspiracy against freedom, profit and fun, and notions like that only riled Plastedd’s temper more. Beyond vendetta, this was Every Honest Independent against the Establishment.

“I’m sorry, Joram.” Han turned on his heel.

The suburban warriors knew better than to launch another disorganized attack, but given time, they’d probably try, with their self-respect and their battered Corellian group conscience on the line.

A couple of steps down the street, Han kicked at the gravel. “Didn’t handle that very well, did I?”

“It’s not your fault that Joram’s set on a fight.” Luke fell into step beside him, the ease in his stride a mite too casual.

“Not my fault?” Han echoed with heavy sarcasm. “Sure, when you overlook the inconvenient fact that I shot his father.”

He remembered the look in Joram’s eyes, old sores nettled to bleed in his presence. And out of uneasiness skirred a dim recollection. The roily gray expanse of Corellian ocean, the roar of wind and surf all around him, and the old man’s bulk at his back like a security shield. The voice of his grandad explaining about underwater farms and deep-sea drill stations, reaping the implements of industry for a sense of adventure. Inventing a secret kingdom beneath the waves.

Han breathed around the stirrings of a very old, dried-out ache. The old man’s voice was still clear and present, but his face had grown hazy with distance and morphed into the haggard features of Drin Plastedd before he could disconnect from that line of thinking.

“I’m sorry for Joram, y’know. I can guess how he must’ve felt.” He’d said it out loud, jarred by recollection and loss. “Like I blew his whole life to pieces.”

And it kept at him as he crossed for the speeder, a restive feeling full of barbs and fangs. Han dropped into the pilot’s seat and wrestled the engines through a cold start the moment Luke had settled in. Localized swirls of dust sprang up around them and blurred the huddle of silhouettes in the street as they swung past.

Daylight had shrunk to a thin slash on the horizon. Powered by the latest brand of cryogenic cells, the loaned speeder shot forward, slicing the millrace of winds like a blade, but Han felt only the drag ― as if he’d caught himself in a rubber sling that could yank him back into the past anytime. Before they’d reached the seams of the inner city, he cut speed abruptly. The vehicle jerked and stuttered to a stop. Straight ahead, between black shoulders of basalt, guttering city lights sprawled in a patchwork tapestry. Han leaned back in his seat and rubbed his bruised jaw.

“I can’t do this.”

Unsurprised, Luke watched him from the near darkness, his silence set off by the wheeze of wind around the rocks.

“I went along with Leia’s solution ‘cause it seemed like the only way to avoid more trouble we don’t need,” Han explained it to himself once more. “Looks like it ain’t gonna work out that way.”

“If we reported this attack to the security forces,” Luke started, the words severed by reluctant pauses, “they might arrest Joram. Or at least put a watch on him until...” He trailed off, the discomfort in his voice much too clear to miss.

“You tryin’ to tell me you _like_ that option?” Han flicked his thumb across the steering lever and didn’t expect a reply. “I can imagine what he sees in me. The big bad bully under state protection, who can get away with murder.”

“Maybe he does,” Luke argued, “and I can understand why he’d feel that way, but he’s still wrong.”

“Not by half as wrong as I’d like,” Han countered with a grimace. At the back of his head, resolve was already shaping up. “I just want this whole business cleared up and done with.”

“Perhaps you should leave. Record a statement for Joram so that he’ll know what happened and―”

“Come on, Luke, that ain’t how _you’d_ do it either." Han turned sideways to see temper sparking, instant protest threatening in Luke’s glance. He held up a hand. “Remember what you said about rational solutions and truth? It’s not just a matter of acknowledging facts, it’s about... facing up to things.”

 _And I don’t wanna leave you_ , he thought on a savage sweep of feeling. _Not now. Not when we need to be together_.

“Don’t do this because of me,” Luke answered, his eyes storm-blue in the gray light. Perceptive enough to probe every dark impulse and ambivalence, taking him apart with nothing but unconditional acceptance.

“You don’t have to prove anything to me,” Luke added.

“I know.” Still amazed him, how that knowledge had sunk to the bottom of his awareness, like a strong current carving its own pathway. And the momentum of it had changed his course, ever since that night on Kashyyyk.

One split second that remade or capsized a life beyond recall. A finger on the trigger, a burst of electricity in the brain, and a moment that set off a chain reaction like an endless ripple. Disparate notions pulled together into sharp focus. He couldn’t have explained what this was all about, but it felt right.

“I’m doing it ‘cause it needs to be done,” he said finally.

“But―”

He gripped Luke’s hand to stop him, to get past all the surface considerations and on to things more essential. “Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

A blast of wind mixed with the rush of blood in his ears. He felt jazzed up on the strange sense of time compacting itself into a single nexus ― twelve years, three years, and the past six days intersecting at odd angles.

“And you know that I’m right,” Han added, stroking his thumb across the back of Luke’s hand.

When he looked up, Luke took a long breath and held it through a private battle that drew his face into harsh lines. “How would they handle such a trial, with only two witnesses?” he asked, straightening under the weight, a gesture that’d long become second nature. “It’s your word against Joram’s.” His glance cut past Han, across the dark line of hills. “You think there might be any official documents ― like, did local security investigate this incident?”

“On Nar Shaddaa?” Han shook his head, almost amused by the notion. Security on that battered transit moon had been left in the hands of hired guns and corrupt front office frips. “No. No records, no evidence, and for all I know, no one who’d remember.”

Luke bent his head and studied their joined hands as he considered, but a moment later his eyes locked hard with Han’s. “What’s the penalty for murder?”

“Life. Not as bad as Corellian kinlaw.” Han cracked a tight grin for reassurance. “But it’s not gonna happen. Whatever they decide, they can’t call it murder. Plastedd had a motive for blasting me to the next star system. I didn’t.”

“ _If_ they see it our way,” Luke said in a different tone, the faint shadow that moved across his face almost drowning in the gloom.

Han seized him close with one arm around his neck. “Gotta take that risk, I guess.”

Not a logical choice. A prison sentence could rip them apart at a crucial junction, but another part of him moved down a trajectory of convergence. Perhaps he’d just tossed out his own challenge to destiny.

* * * * *

Early daylight simmered through layers of dusky silk, glistening through a room where the negotiators had already drawn their battle lines. Luke watched their uptight expressions and listened to the talks through a fizzling veil of anticipation.

On the other side of the city, Dareil’s Chief Prosecutor was selecting jury members for a murder trial. And for the first time in days, Han looked completely relaxed, as if the last night’s decision had created a new space around him.

Vigorous as usual, the Dareilian Fleet Commander insisted that resuming customs ruptured by Imperial rule was the entire point of joining the New Republic. True to official doctrine, Tal Hakim expounded the benefits of mutual rapprochement and compromise. A draft from the window lifted the curtains, and bright reflections skittered across the conference table. Small arrowheads of sunlight that faded again like an exhaled breath.

Another brilliant, cloudless day outside, and tomorrow the trial would commence. Tomorrow. According to common rumor, the brisk pace of jurisdiction was a residue of Imperial efficiency. The Fleet Commander had knotted her long, bony fingers together. Luke tuned in again to hear a rephrased version of her reasoning.

“...we appreciate your assistance with the reorganization of our defense forces,” she said with arctic exactness, “but our senior officers are not accustomed to taking orders from male superiors. Forcing such an innovation will only make our cooperation more difficult.”

Across an expanse of malachite, Madine glared openly at her, indifferent to the Commander’s kinship with the D’haya. Like habitual sparring partners, they parried back and forth through a dispute about the status of the Dareilian males who’d risen in military rank under Imperial rule.

“Please understand that we simply don’t have the personnel to meet your demands,” Leia intervened at length. “The number of female officers in command positions is very limited.”

“And you accuse _us_ of discrimination?” the Dareilian asked, her voice sharp with disbelief. “We were led to assume that only the Empire restricted active duty to males.”

“It’s not so much a matter of legal restrictions as it is of convention and prejudice,” Leia returned with a sidelong glance at Madine. “We’re making an effort to correct this imbalance, but some time will pass before any of our measures take effect.”

The Commander sat back, indigo eyes scanning the room for new options and alliances. “The Jedi never excluded any sentient from training, is that not so?”

That was the theory, if not always actual practice. “Every prejudice is based on lack of knowledge,” Luke said with the judicious reserve that never came easy. “And nobody’s immune to that. We have to learn from each other.”

He glanced at Han who’d leaned forward with a sudden spark in his eyes, alerted by some inadvertent cue. “Actually,” Han said slowly, “maybe _you_ could help us improve the situation in our own fleet.”

When their eyes met, Luke felt again the small shock of awareness, like a glimpse of the place where they’d be facing each other tomorrow, across the sterile distance of a courtroom. At the same time, something swept him into the drift of Han’s thoughts.

“Perhaps we could work out an exchange. If your officers were to serve with our fleet―”

“―and our Academy graduates could complete their training here,” Han finished, “we could raise the quota sooner than we’d manage otherwise.”

Something dimmed Leia’s smile when her glance wandered over to him, but her voice betrayed nothing. “Such an arrangement could be to our mutual benefit,” she agreed, shining boundless optimism at the Fleet Commander’s frown. “Let’s consider this from all angles.”

 

Several hours passed before the session closed, releasing the delegates into noon-break. They’d made it halfway down the corridor when Leia joined them, her incredulous glance arresting Han in mid-stride. “The Chief of Protocol just notified me that the proceedings against you have been resumed.”

His jaw set into a stubborn line. “That’s right.”

“You’ve discarded your diplomatic status to stand trial?” Bafflement gave way to protest as Leia looked him up and down, and a shadow of the same reaction swept Luke, like the chill of night-winds against his skin. “I’m not even sure that’s legally possible.”

Han folded his arms. “The Prosecutor’s staff didn’t have a problem with it. Way I see it, it’s my right to say _no thanks_ to that kind of protection.” A shade of suspicion crossed his face. “Listen, if you were planning to revoke my―”

“You could have informed me first!” Leia flared.

“Come on, you know there wasn’t any time this morning,” Han retorted, all laid-back, a deliberate provocation. “And don’t worry, it won’t affect the negotiations. It’s my choice, so whatever happens, Coruscant’s got no reason to jump the gun and raise hell for my sake.”

“It’s _you_ that I’m worried about,” she said quietly. “But yes, there could be repercussions, whether you like it or not.”

“Then I guess I’ll just have to convince that jury.”

“I don’t believe you have any idea―”

“Leia,” Han stopped her, every trace of defensiveness abruptly gone. “It’s my responsibility, all right?”

“I don’t understand you.” Her shoulders sank, and she sent a glance full of exasperation in Luke’s direction. “Do you really think you can win this case? You used to say that every legal system is compromised by political machinations.”

“There’s no evidence,” Luke voiced what he kept repeating to himself. “Nothing to base a verdict on.” And whatever his expression revealed turned Leia’s gaze thoughtful.

“I hope you’re right,” she said with unyielding skepticism. “Because if you aren’t...”

No need to spell out the consequences. Luke turned to a darkly tinted window and the vista of flat silhouettes, hostile and unyielding under a slab of sky. His pulse faster than Leia’s retreating steps.

“I have to go back to the library,” he said, acutely aware of Han’s presence at his shoulder. The silence between them flush with misgivings he couldn’t force aside. Without another word, Han walked him to the bank of lifts.

“You think it’s the wrong thing to do.” He’d planted his feet apart, dark eyes glued to the display where a purple arrow scaled their level, a soft whirr measuring seconds.

Conflicting answers rushed Luke’s mind and canceled each other out. _I could make Joram listen. I could make the jury listen. I have the power_. Imposing the truth wouldn’t alter its substance after all. But every line of Han’s body was pulled taut, clandestine movement trapped inside him, urging him to acknowledge a moment twelve years past.

 _You don’t have to protect me_ , Luke remembered. He shook his head. “All I need to know is that it’s right for you.”

* * *

When he climbed the worn-out steps to the library, sunlight slid along the length of his back, and he turned at the top to look directly at the primary. A faint tremor ran down his spine.

 _This world is not my enemy_. Luke stilled, eyes closing as his mind opened to the Force. Mock suns jiggled their burning blues and greens across his sight as he released himself, slipping from level to level like a hunting bird, through layered patterns of energy. From the staccato signatures of closed consciousness to the long curves of growth among the ranks of conifers. Through their wide root systems rippled liquid power, a taste like wet silver.

He sank deeper, away from the prickling of loose dirt against the skin of a rocky flank, the wind’s caress. Down, where the slow grind of basalt against coal and crystal enclosed him, the deep static pressure hibernating in the rock. It whispered around him, alive.

He took that stillness into himself, breathing it, breathing with the long, dreamless sleep of mountains until it rose up into his bones and crushed the flares of fear, hope, and rebellion into one. Until time ceased to exist and everything he knew was the slow world revolution, contained within itself. Alive. And he was part of it, able to understand and influence only because all of life embraced him. No more than another speck of energy within a swirl of constantly changing currents. Colored fierce as the sky, the certainty burst up and scattered him wide.

 _All I want_...

Through the glitter of moments, of atoms, he felt Han’s presence, passing through him with the ease of air and light.

_Here. What more do you need?_

Luke spun back into himself, almost giddy, one hand braced against the stone balustrade. When he turned inside, he could hardly feel the weight of his body, only the minute tectonic shifts in the ground that carried him and focused him like a compass.

Kiéru had waited for him, the research cubicle now a battlefield, littered with printouts and tapes and scribbled notes. While a new throng of texts paraded across the screen, she sat beside him, and Luke answered her occasional queries without paying much attention until she straightened, the sudden movement tinkling the beads in her thin braids.

“You don’t like being indoors, do you?”

“I’m sorry.” He pushed his fingers through his hair as if that could realign his thoughts. “I’ve been... distracted.”

“I could tell,” she said dryly.

“It’s just that―” Luke started, but explanations and excuses faltered as a new header scrolled up on the screen.

 _On Life-Bonds and Their Forging_. His fingers leapt across the keyboard, pulling up an index. The study contained a chapter about bonds between unevenly matched partners and all the answers he’d been looking for. They were nothing he could accept.

Chiseled fragments of dogma scurried past as he skimmed the dry wisdom from another world, other dreams of being.

... _in such a case, a complete merging of spirits is not advisable_.

“Here we go with the warnings again,” Kiéru muttered, bending closer to the monitor.

... _limit the joining to emotive and cognitive levels_...

Luke stiffened in his seat, refusal snapping fast and hard through his gut. ... _accept the imbalance. The Force-sensitive partner must remain in control, for they understand the spirit’s destiny, and their life-essence will join the Force, while the other’s will not_...

“That’s not true.”

The sound of his own voice startled him. Kiéru gave him a sidelong glance as if checking for signs of mental instability.

 _Destiny_. How long he’d clung to that concept. And now... For a few moments more, Luke kept his eyes riveted on the monitor, willing the document to yield up another kind of meaning, anger and laughter rising with the same vehemence.

“The Force is in _everything_ ,” he said, quenching both. “One source of life in so many different shapes. Never forget that.”

He pushed his chair back, abruptly tired, the phalanx of words blurring before him. “How many of the manuscripts have we viewed by now?”

Kiéru hunched her shoulders. “Not nearly half of them.”

 _And there’s no answer for me here_. Was that feeling just arrogance, the stubborn response of a half-trained latecomer? With an effort, Luke reminded himself of the purpose that’d taken him here. “When you worked on the translations,” he asked, “did you come across any reference to the prophecy... about a Chosen One, and balance restored to the Force?”

Kiéru dropped her head forward and stared down at her hands, frowning. “Not that I remember, but I could cross-reference the files. Where did you hear about that?”

“Your mother mentioned it, shortly after our arrival.”

“But she never looked at any of the―” Kiéru broke off and quirked a shrewd smile. “I shouldn’t have told you that, I guess.”

“I won’t mention it.” Luke touched a key, and the monitor darkened into hushed gray. _What is a Jedi?_ he quoted the vexing question to himself. _What am I? The last, or the first_...

All the texts he’d studied parceled and ranked the Force. Divisions, oppositions. Darkness and Light, passion and serenity. The Chosen One. Just one, essential isolation. The lightheaded feeling returned and brought him to his feet. “Not all of them were like this. Don’t believe everything you read.”

Kiéru returned a long-suffering look. “Where are you going?”

He smiled at her. “The only place where I should be right now.”

* * *

Locked and unlit, the Falcon’s bulk squatted on the landing platform. The day’s sessions had ended some time ago, but wherever Han had gone, the battered freighter would be his retreat for the night. This night more than any other.

Luke keyed in the release code and sat at the bottom of the lowered ramp, within a margin of auxiliary lighting. Swathes of mauve on the horizon set off a bright ribbon in the glacial blue above. Through the veil of atmosphere glimmered the densely-packed suns of the galactic Core.

He still sat there, studying constellations of light in the Dareilian night-sky, when a lone speeder pulled up beside the Falcon.

“Hey!” Han vaulted over the side before the craft stopped rocking in its antigrav cradle. “What’re you doin’ here?”

“Waiting for you.”

But the look of startled pleasure gave way as Han walked up. Regret touched Luke again like a dark breeze. There’d never been such a need for caution between them. _Not much longer_ , he thought.

“I went for a ride.” Han scratched at the stubble shading his cheek. “Out to the coast. Sort of tryin’ to clear my head and remember exactly what happened on Nar Shaddaa. Not that anything unexpected came up...” His eyes swept across Luke as if to decode some unspoken intent. “Guess I’m as ready for tomorrow as I can be.”

“So they’re done selecting a jury?”

“Yeah.” Han lowered himself onto the ramp and stretched his legs. “And with a hand-picked jury full of better-born ladies I guess there’s no reason to worry about prejudice ‘n all that. We’re both of us male, both offworlders... True, Joram’s married to a native, but that’s the only edge he’s got over me.”

“What you’ve done for the Alliance should matter as well,” Luke countered. Much as he’d expected, Han made a derisive noise, and it drew a smile from him, thoughts shifting focus as he studied the strong profile. “To think that I brought you here, and I had no idea―”

“I asked for it, remember?” Han shot him a warning glance.

“That’s not what I meant.” Luke leaned back on his elbows, searching for a start among broken pinpoints of light. “Without you, without all the things that happened here, I never would’ve known...” But words fell short when so much poured into him, right out of the sky, glitter-quick and shimmering with infinite openness. “I just realized how much it’s changed the way I feel about... everything.”

“Like what?” The dubious note in Han’s voice demanded something more substantial.

“I’ve been thinking about the prophecy,” Luke said. “The Chosen One.”

“Found anything interesting in the archives?”

“No, and it doesn’t look like I will. Kiéru doesn’t think there’s anything about it in those manuscripts, either.”

“So her old dame pulled that one out of her hat just to bait you? Figures. That manipulative―” Han cut himself off with a slicing gesture.

“It doesn’t matter.” Luke straightened, discarding it with a shrug. “I don’t think I’d agree with those views anyway. The old order believed it referred to a single individual, set apart by the Force.”

“And it doesn’t?” Silhouetted against the Falcon’s hull, Han’s frown deepened.

“I think it just reflects their need for a destined savior. The Force doesn’t work that way. The prophecy’s about change and growth, but they’d stopped to believe change could come from within.” Luke sat forward, banding his arms around his knees. “I found something about life-bonds as well.”

“Yeah?” The brief tightening of Han’s muscles was barely perceptible in the faint light.

“It was very... restrictive,” Luke said. “Trapped in chains of cause and effect. If this, then that. Take the proper precautions, and you’ll avoid unpleasant consequences... It made me see that I was starting to think like that myself.” He paused, but Han’s ‘told you so’ didn’t come, only a ripple through his mood that eased tacit pressures aside. Luke smiled ruefully. “Well. I guess the writer didn’t really understand why a Jedi would want to bond with someone who’s not Force-sensitive in the first place.”

“Must’ve spent all his time among other Jedi.” Wry humor twitched on Han’s mouth. “They probably spent their lives feeling sorry for the Force-blind rest of the universe.”

“Probably.” Luke turned sideways for a better look at him, the loose and easy sprawl of his limbs, and the sight slid generous warmth into every corner of his mind. “I might’ve ended up the same way, without you.”

“You?” Han snorted. “You’ve always been far too involved in... everything that went on. From someone’s stubbed toe to the woes of the galaxy. And you can still get excited about the latest skyhopper like it’s a rippin’ miracle.” His grin flashed from precise recollection. “You’re way too alive to keep yourself aloof.”

“By the end of the war,” Luke said, “I don’t think a lot of people still saw that in me.” A small motion brought him within range of touching, fingers skimming the arched line that defined Han’s throat. “And nobody ever made me feel it the way you do.”

Han stilled beneath his caress, eyes locked to a point in the middle distance, as if the moment’s ease could evaporate if he stirred. “You think that’s a good reason for... a life-bond?”

“A very good reason.” Luke’s breath faltered, joined the warmth of skin at the side of Han’s neck. “Among countless others.”

“Luke...” Han drew back and grabbed his shoulders with serious pressure. “About the things you’ve told me. Some just don’t make any sense.”

Sudden expectation prickled on his skin. “Tell me.”

“You’re saying you can’t control it, ‘cause it’s destiny ― and at the same time you want _me_ to make a choice. So what if I don’t cooperate with destiny? And how come _you_ don’t have a choice?”

An imbalance as blatant as the one that’d glared off the monitor, a few hours ago. _It’s a personal concept_ , Luke wanted to say, _just my understanding of destiny_ ― but then, what was the difference?

“No matter what we think, it’s either destiny _or_ choice,” Han went on. “You really believe the Force picked _me_ to be your one and only? Sounds to me like it’s got a weird sense of humor.”

“That’s not how it is,” Luke started, but the pressure of Han’s grip stopped him.

“No, hear me out. If it wasn’t me, there’d be somebody else. And maybe someday when I’m not around anymore—”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Luke said tightly.

“And that’s the problem right there.” Han raised a hand to tap his chest for emphasis. “Luke, you’ve _got_ to think of it that way, or it’ll never work out. Either we’re both free to choose, or neither of us is. It’s not the Force pushing us. Get it?”

Luke swallowed. Thoughtless protest fell apart before the wild range of possible futures, all those untamed currents within the Force. Powerful enough to blind him with fear, maybe. “But there’s... a purpose to everything that happens through the Force.”

“Could be, that’s not for me to tell.” Han shrugged. “All I’m sayin’ is, you gotta know what you want, Force or no Force. Just... for yourself.”

“I’ve known _that_ a long time.” Luke trailed his fingers across the broad shoulder, where a muscle stretched suddenly tight over the bone.

“Convince me.” Mocking challenge entered Han’s eyes in a vivid shade of amber.

But he’d run out of words, at a loss to express how this feeling colored his world, each moment igniting with the dance and sway of firelight. All he could do was claim Han’s mouth, kiss the breath from his lungs. A hand locked firm around his neck, mooring him. When they broke for air, his hands framed Han’s jaw, touching pulsepoints like crucial coordinates.

“I believe you,” Han said huskily, dark eyes drunk with fatigue and wanting.

“You should get some rest.”

“Lemme tell you, sleep’s the last thing on my mind right now.” Han’s mouth curled, amusement and resignation at odds with the heat in his gaze. “Listen... you know that I’m right, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Luke breathed around a new sense of freedom that could unsettle everything he thought he knew. An unstable energy field that charged and recharged between them, grounded somewhere outside the order of time. Han’s mouth slid across his hair, a sharp breath buried at this temple, and he didn’t know what kind of answer he was giving, just that he had to give something. Now.

An electric silence released his name, a low vibration among his thoughts more than actual sound. His grip tightened, but his defenses surrendered into the flare of Han’s presence. Before Luke could stop himself, fleeting contact shifted into a promise for more, expanding as living currents surged under his hands and against his senses, the rich and compelling tapestry of Han’s mind that cradled scattered parts of himself.

A savage throb of pulse yanked him back, into the close boundaries of reason. As much as they both wanted to be ready, they weren’t — yet — but somewhere ahead of them sparked a moment like a meteorite striking atmosphere at an oblique angle. A moment they’d have to meet separately. _Though I don’t know how_...

For a moment made of liberation, Han had closed his eyes. Luke pressed his palm down flat over a strong heartbeat. _We can. We will_.

“All right...” A shaky breath lifted Han’s chest when he looked up again, and he covered his reaction by pulling to his feet. “I guess the rest’ll have to wait ‘til later.”

When he’d disappeared in the Falcon’s familiar darkness, Luke drew up his knees, every nerve alive with jangled, restless feelings. As if he’d never need to sleep again.

* * * * *

  
**~ 4 ~**  


The crowds had rolled in early. At least a hundred dark goggles swung about and tracked him all the way to the giant portals. Han kept up a steady pace, but a sidelong glance showed him stiff unease in the set of Luke’s shoulders.

Cooler airs brushed up against them when they crossed the threshold into outright murk. Leia stepped from the shadows by the entrance, wearing the smile she’d frequently turned out for the Rebels’ suicide commandos.

“Don’t look so worried,” Han said just to needle her. “One more day, and we can get back to business.”

“You’re impossible,” she muttered through that unfaltering smile. “Some things never change.”

The courtroom was hangar-sized and echoed like a tomb. Carved friezes ran around the walls, sporting abstract patterns and inscriptions Han couldn’t read. Just as well, he’d already swallowed a lecture about procedural rules in the Prosecutor’s office this morning.

Between highbrow members of the royal court, the delegates perched on a martial array of benches at the hall’s center. Each and every one of them nodding and smiling for his benefit, like a jolly backup team. Han returned a summary nod for greeting.

Still flanked by Luke and Leia, he stalked up to the empty seats at the front. From a plinth on the far side, the Chief Prosecutor surveyed the scene, a fenced-off space on her left where twenty-five jurors would line up. None of the active participants ever got to sit down during trials: another arrangement to provide high-speed results. On her right, a scribe lurked behind a one-legged document stand, leafing through heavy parchment. At her back, an open doorway framed a cluster of curious scarecrows.

With a nod for Han, the Prosecutor turned and waved the shadows forward. The twenty-five shuffled to their designated position, a tight flock in uni-sized robes that hung awkwardly on their frames. Yet something about them caught at Han and triggered instant alarm.

He fumbled for a curse when realization struck hard. Male profiles among the shaved genteel heads of the jury, thatches of brown and copper hair, and the indefinable cant of Corellian heartstock leapt out from the throng of strangers.

So the legal department had unbent to hand-pick stooges from the Corellian community. And just how many of them did Joram count among his buddies? For a moment Han’s brain locked up in calculation of adverse odds, and his stomach flipped under the impact of his mistake.

Luke had edged closer, every muscle taut with unease. “They can’t do that.”

“Who’s gonna stop ‘em?” Han put a sarcastic spin on the words, annoyance trapped between clenched teeth. Damn that he’d trusted Dareilian traditions to be carved in everlasting stone.

“I should have guessed.” Anger laced Leia’s quiet voice. “They’re using the trial to demonstrate that they’re willing to adapt and modify their customs. This is unprecedented.”

“Flattering,” Han muttered under his breath. “Think I’ll get another decoration for provoking a diplomatic breakthrough?” Tough luck that the gesture also tilted the odds against him.

His hand found Luke’s and loosened the clench of his fingers with reassuring pressure. Grisly-looking odds used to send his brainwaves buzzing. Han tried a grin against the frozen feel of his face.

At the Prosecutor’s signal, a minor tide of noise faltered into expectant silence. Han gripped his fingers tighter around Luke’s, then let go, taking a step forward just as Joram moved across the room. The Prosecutor intoned something about respect for the court and Joram dropped promptly down on one knee. Han made himself copy the gesture and knelt, his head up and his blood pounding out a crimson alert. By the time he got back to his feet, he’d reached the zoned-out calm that came as a bonus with the worst of emergencies.

What a screw-up. Yeah, well. No help for it now but to play along. Han took himself to the witness stand behind a low stone railing. When he turned to face the gathering, he saw the balcony set high in the wall above the portals. An empty space like a front-row seat reserved for the accusing dead. The Prosecutor positioned herself at a distance.

“Defendant,” she started with unsmiling professionalism, “please state your name and rank for the protocol.”

From there, her questions guided him through a reiteration of circumstances and mishaps, blow by blow, without bias or sympathy.

“Plastedd surprised me,” Han said finally. “I didn’t expect to see him on Nar Shaddaa, and I still don’t know how he tracked me down. I was standing by the bar when somebody yelled my name. The next thing I knew was Plastedd coming at me.”

“Was he armed?”

“He had a jackknife open and ready.” Though he’d rehearsed those lines like an offbeat mantra, Han caught himself bracing for the inevitable with a deeper breath. “I got my blaster out and shot him.”

“Did you aim to kill?” The Prosecutor’s piercing look announced that they’d reached the slipslide of entirely subjective factors.

“He was barreling towards me over a distance of maybe three meters. By the time I fired my shot, he’d covered more than half that distance. Even if I’d aimed only to stop him, I might’ve killed him.”

“But you didn’t?”

Han shook his head. They could dissect this moment until doomsday, and it wouldn’t yield up any sweeter crop. “There wasn’t any time. I reacted on pure instinct, but I didn’t deliberately aim to kill him either.”

“I see.” Her expression revealed nothing. “Why do you think he shouted your name?” she launched the first wholly unpredicted question.

“I don’t know,” Han answered and could’ve sworn that he felt Luke’s tension from across the room. “He sounded furious. It was like... a battle cry.” _Or a warning_ , he added to himself, hazarding a glance at the jury beneath the carved canopy. _Maybe_.

“How many have you killed under comparable circumstances?” the Prosecutor veered to a new line of inquiry, delivering the obligatory poke at his scuzzy past. “Face to face, not in the course of military campaigns.”

“A couple.”

“You don’t recall their exact number?”

Before he could throttle the reaction, Han felt his backbone stiffen. “I’ll remember if you give me a minute, but I don’t keep a record. It’s not like these deaths make up some sort of... trophy collection.”

“Then, what are they to you?” she asked in a kinder tone. Out to prompt some sympathy-boosting expression of regret, no doubt — but in all honesty, he couldn’t work up the degree of contrition that’d do the trick.

“A matter of survival,” Han said bluntly, “and... a result of unfavorable circumstances.”

“General Solo, if you were faced with the same situation again, do you believe you’d react differently today?”

She’d raised a hand as if pointing straight at a serviceable loophole. With some well-placed amendments, he could pour oil on the jury’s attitude, hand them the plausible portrait of a man who’d straightened out after a misspent youth. Pity that it didn’t resemble him much.

“It’s a split-second thing,” Han tried to explain. “A trained reflex. At the time, it meant drawing fast enough. That’s not how I handle conflicts these days.” He flicked a glance at Joram’s stony expression, scanning for the tracks of a street-fight two days ago. “Not if I can help it.”

The Prosecutor inclined her head. “Thank you, General.”

Dismissed. Han stepped away from the railing and for a giddy half-second felt as if gravity had lightened a notch. Something was slowly sinking through to the bottom of his stomach, too vague and ambiguous to be named. He swept a parting glance across the jury. Like as not, reducing life-and-death issues to synaptic interfacing had scandalized them.

Joram Plastedd avoided his glance as they traded places, his head bowed and his hands knotted together.

“It’s possible that my father overreacted,” he conceded before anyone could ask. “Who wouldn’t, when they’ve just lost a close friend? And it’s just as possible that he blamed Solo for something that wasn’t his fault ― I have no way of judging that. But...” He choked off the word and charmed the jury into supportive mutters.

Stuck somewhere between defensive sarcasm and discomfort, Han watched from the sidelines. The studied drama worked only because it was based on chronic grief.

“What I know beyond doubt,” Plastedd continued, “is that my father never intended to kill Solo.”

“How do you know this?” the Prosecutor asked with reassuring coolness.

“He went to that place unarmed.” Joram’s voice had picked up an audible tremor.

“What about the jacknife?”

“If he ever owned one, he didn’t carry it that night.”

No knife. On a flash of adrenaline, Han reassessed his footing. Cornered, and about to be served for public dissection.

“My father went for Solo with his bare hands,” Plastedd continued to bang out his credo. “That he called his name proves he wasn’t going to play dirty.”

“What, in your opinion, did your father intend?”

“An honest fist-fight. That’s how he used to deal with trouble.” For a moment, Joram looked like a boy who’d gotten well-acquainted with his father’s punch. “Dad took a swing at him, and Solo shot him without batting a lash. That’s all I can tell you.”

The audience broke into collective murmurs. And it was over. Han curled his hands into fists. All over already, with all the sympathy cards stacked against him.

The Prosecutor turned towards the jury, raised hands commanding attention. “Please consider. One of these two men saw a knife in Drin Plastedd’s hand, the other didn’t. Both have offered to confirm their testimony under influence of a truth serum. Both were under stress at the time, which may have affected their observations.”

Han remembered to draw the next breath. A pair of uniformed guards had slunk to either side of him when the Prosecutor stopped them with a gesture.

“General Solo, would you answer one more question?”

He squared his shoulders. “Sure.”

“The court is aware that you chose to stand trial when you could have avoided prosecution.” She blinked, dispassion shading towards puzzlement. “Would you share with us your reasons for this choice?”

One final effort to strip away the mercenary tag, the reek of an unsavory past, and let the man of honor shine.

“It was necessary,” Han answered. He could feel Luke’s eyes on him, the way he’d always felt that absolutely focused look, and met his glance for a moment that belonged to no one else. “When I think of that day on Nar Shaddaa,” he said roughly, “it’s almost like I’m looking at somebody else. But no matter what, everything that happened there’s still a part of me. And I’ve got to follow it through.”

Famous last words. Han congratulated himself on failing to score a point; none of this could make much sense to the jury. The guards escorted him to the exit at the back of the hall. When he couldn’t resist another backward glance, Joram wore a smile that would’ve looked just right on an executioner.

 

They left him alone in a windowless cubicle equipped with a single chair and a blinking surveillance unit. Allotting him three square meters and a vacant stretch of time to rally all the regrets he might want for company. Han paced across to occupy the exact spot where the electronic eye couldn’t reach.

No way around it, the human factor would likely tip the balance. Joram had lost a parent and deserved some compensation for his grief. Besides that, everything hinged on the answer to one miserable question. A knife or no knife. If the jury swallowed the claim that honest traders walked around Nar Shaddaa unarmed, he was sunk.

 _What’ve I done?_ Han leaned back against the wall, and for the first time since he’d knocked on the Prosecutor’s door, the ground started to pitch and sway dangerously under his feet.

 _You went in there like you can take on anything_ , he reminded himself. _Better get ready to prove it_.

What kind of point exactly had he thought he’d make? Stage some real-life gut-spilling to impress the hell out of Luke who’d believed him from the first? Who’d never wanted a public confession either?

Perhaps all the eager muck-raking had gotten to him more than he’d wanted to admit. Perhaps he’d tired of listening to the grapevine’s tacky chorus: not-worthy-of-a-Jedi, gotta-be-a-champion-in-bed. Han rubbed at his stubbled chin and tried to ignore the weariness that crept up his spine. Hell of a price to pay for an ego that grew tender in all the wrong places.

 _Damnit, Luke_... His chest went tight around the breath he drew. _Gods, I’m sorry_.

Now where was the shining confidence that’d taken him for a ride these last few days? He’d followed up on a gut feeling like no other, and it had him mired in dazed regrets. A godawful chill started at the side of his neck, crawling up and down with every dry jab of pulse.

For the life of him, Han couldn’t have said how much time had passed when the guards unlocked the door.

The cant of apology in the Prosecutor’s face told him enough. Guilty. Well, he’d seen that coming, and if one dependable law plagued the universe, it ruled that all things fell prey to entropy.

From circular skylights, afternoon slanted into the hall, bent uncluttered lines and angles and reflected off glossy marble. Seemed like more than a few hours had vanished down some unmarked time sink. The Prosecutor moved aside to let the defendant enter the arena, and the first he saw was Luke, profiled in atomic shades of fractured white and bronze.

Armed guards blocked Han’s path, and he froze where he was, forgot about entropy, about stockpiled payback for wasted years. Thunderstruck, like all of his life had shrunk and squeezed itself into the distance of a few unbridgeable meters separating him from Luke.

To be so near and never touch him again ― was that what Luke had been up against all along, crushing some vital instinct, reaching out and bolting it down at the same time? The strain that gathered below Han’s breath thrummed like clockwork, counting out wasted days and nights. Rebellion swept him in a long, violent wave.

Their eyes met in the space of a heartbeat. _Relax_ , the sound of his own voice came back to Han, across the divide of hours, trailed by the crisp scents of early morning. _They can’t convict me of something I didn’t do_.

_But what if―?_

_Then you’ll have to let me go_.

So now life was going to take him up on all that jazz. And if he lost Luke... No conclusion to that thought. Only a breathless void, wrenching at his gut.

A hum of high-wired anticipation mounted through the hall, and the Prosecutor had to thump her ceremonial staff against the tiles to restore discipline. While the audience backed down into their seats, the jury filed in, humble as the dust in their baggy robes. A thin smile bent Luke’s mouth, and Han made an effort to return it through the pressure in his head and his lungs.

“Revered citizens of Dareil,” the Prosecutor addressed the jurors, “have you reached an agreement?”

The affirmative they chorused back at her came in bashful murmurs, several voices lagging uncertainly behind. A reedy woman stepped forward, shaved eyebrows marking her as lower-caste, her hairline shorn back to the middle of her skull. She bowed before the Prosecutor, drawing two fingers in a horizontal line across her exposed forehead.

“The jury did not reach accord with ease,” she said in heavily accented Basic.

Well, that was something, Han supposed, minutely shifting his weight.

“After much debate, we have found General Solo guilty of killing a man without compelling justification. His claim that he acted in self-defense does not convince us.”

“The charge in question is murder,” the Prosecutor reminded her.

“Yes.” The woman lowered her glance. “And so he is guilty of that.”

The words plummeted to the bottom of Han’s mind with the fatal precision of missiles, but the sensation they stirred up was strange and full, not at all like getting caught in a down-draft. Could be cosseting shock before the pain set in. After a split second, a low tumult erupted in the courtroom, and Luke was on his feet, an angry shout on his lips, though it formed no sound. _No!_

Pale-faced, Leia rose beside him, a restraining hand on her brother’s arm, daggers in her eyes. Han turned to them, on the vague impulse to reassure, though he didn’t know how, when the juror stepped hastily forward.

“Our reasoning may be flawed,” she continued in a raised voice. “The verdict is based on one man’s word, and that is very little when it comes to taking another man’s freedom. We have debated long what to do about this.”

“Yes,” the Prosecutor prompted impatiently while her glance flashed warnings at the unquiet crowd.

“We have a time-honored tradition to solve such a dilemma.” The woman straightened and looked directly at Han. “If General Solo agrees to cross the Sundering Bridge, the sentence will be suspended. The ordeal will prove his guilt or his innocence in this matter.”

Some gasps went up from the crowd and settled into renewed, inchoate mutters. Han gulped in a breath and couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “I’m ready to―”

“I must warn you, General Solo,” the Prosecutor interrupted with another thud of her staff. “Before you make a decision, consider. Just as you may regain your freedom, you may lose your life if you set foot on this bridge.” Her voice rose to a pitch, like chunks of broken marble grating together. “This is how one of our foremothers described the Sundering Bridge: _Sharp as a razor, blighting as daylight, impassable for the unjust_.”

Han spread his hands, shook his head and opened his mouth to demand more information, minus the histrionics, but the Prosecutor preempted him.

“The bridge is made of truesteel,” she told him, her tone reverting back to normal. “Fifty meters long, as wide as a hand, it spans a chasm in the mountains. There are records of successful crossings, but...”

 _But_. He’d heard enough, and damned if he let anyone quote him the odds on this one. A shadow of motion up on the balcony tugged at Han’s attention, and he looked straight at its single occupant.

The D’haya inclined her head towards him. Maybe she’d engineered this compromise. _Smart move_ , Han thought, no matter who’d cooked it up. They’d tossed the ball back at him; if he didn’t make it, Dareil could disclaim all responsibility. Joram Plastedd, to his credit, looked stricken instead of triumphant.

Han fixed a resolute glance on him. “I didn’t murder your father, Joram, and I’m sorry I shot him. I’m ready to cross that bridge to prove it.”

When Plastedd lowered his head in a slow nod, every muscle promised just tolerance, not forgiveness. Agitation darted back and forth through the audience. While the jurors hurried from their post to mingle with the crowd, the New Republic’s delegates lurched forward, Leia at the front. Han used the moment’s dissolution to push towards Luke. They met somewhere in the tide of bodies.

“Don’t,” Luke said in a sandpaper voice, both hands delving into Han’s jacket. “I’ll wait, no matter how long it takes. And if it takes a lifetime―”

“It won’t.” Han gripped his hands and held tight. Absurd, to even think of it. A sharp pang struck his ribcage at the stark unhappiness on Luke’s face. _Parallels intersect at infinity, remember that_.

Something had gone into a spin and left him breathless. As if jostled by disparate air currents, he turned with it, felt again that catalytic force of certainty and from it liberation. Not a linear feeling at all.

When a stranger’s hand tapped his shoulder, he pulled Luke against him on a wild breath. _It’s gonna be all right, kid, I promise you_. Han brushed his knuckles down Luke’s jaw. “I’ll be back.”

Some answering radiance flickered in Luke’s face, just before the guards hustled Han away.

* * *

He’d expected some kind of detention cell, but when the door banged shut at his back, the room was nothing like it. A lofty parlor traversed by a long carpet, a single, high-backed chair at the end of that purple runway. An alignment of candle flames wavered in the draft as the door on the far side opened.

Dressed in plain dark clothes, the D’haya had chosen to present herself with a touch of the austere. “General Solo,” she said solemnly. “I wished to speak with you before the ordeal tomorrow.”

Han made sure that not a muscle in his face betrayed surprise. “About what, Highness?”

“I’ve watched you and Skywalker carefully today. It seems that he bows to your choices.”

“If you’re worried that he might spring a rescue or try to interfere...” Han crossed his arms. “He won’t.”

“You’re very certain,” she remarked, easing into the chair as if settling in for a sociable evening’s smalltalk. “I’ve studied your file, General, even though I suspect that the official records are incomplete. Your life has undergone the most dramatic changes since you joined the Rebel Alliance. I take it that your association with Skywalker had a profound impact on you.”

“So?” Han retorted, trying hard not to snarl. “I had my reasons.”

“Ah, I can guess.” The D’haya leaned into the chair’s high back and traced idle patterns on its ornamented arm. “You see, the leaders of our ancient houses used to take as many husbands as they desired. But the rulers before me found that the Jedi knights they married fulfilled all their needs.” She slanted him a long glance that traveled slowly down his frame. “Perhaps you have found the same to be true.”

Han set his teeth. “Perhaps.”

“Would you say that the reverse applies as well?” she continued, untroubled by his curt reply. “That you are the consort to satisfy a Jedi’s personal needs?”

All the insinuations shone through, clear as daylight. Han could guess that her pet plans for a convenient marriage were still hitching along at full steam. And within that scenario he probably figured as the shaggy old toy in the Jedi’s closet.

“It doesn’t work out like arithmetics,” he said noncommittally. “You’d have to ask him.”

“Dareil has much to offer to a man like Skywalker,” the D’haya returned in cooler tones, as if she’d tired of all the innuendo and jive. “If he could be persuaded to transfer his Jedi enclave on our world―”

“I don’t make his decisions for him,” Han said brusquely.

“But you have a certain influence, don’t you?” she countered with mild amusement. “Surely Skywalker would want to preserve your life, and if I offered you a pardon, don’t you think he would be grateful?”

“A _pardon_?” Han echoed before he could clamp down on it.

“I could end this absurdity.” The ruler smoothed out a fold in her long tunic. “In exchange, I would ask only that you use your... influence to convince Skywalker that a move to Dareil would be mutually beneficial.”

Yep, she’d rigged her stage with all the right attractions: Jedi traditions all over the place, manuscripts swathed in mystery, and a princess who’d make a proper partner for Luke ― student or spouse, didn’t really matter which. A thing of perfection, except that the male lead didn’t swing to her tune. The trial must’ve come like a godsend, Han supposed, and that ground-breaking selection of a motley jury fit right in there, all part of a neat set-up to crank up her leverage with the recalcitrant Jedi.

“That’s all you want me to do?” he asked. “Promise I’ll talk to Luke, and I’ll be home free?”

“You’re an honorable man. I know that you will stand by your word.”

 _Don’t count on it_. Han took pleasure from turning up the voltage of his smile. “Sorry, but no.”

“And if I asked the Jedi―”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he cut in scathingly, oblivious for the moment to court etiquette and diplomatic foul-ups. “You’ll get nothing else from him.”

“Very well.” The candlelight turned her face to painted alabaster. “If you prefer to risk your life, so be it. I shall have you escorted to the Sundering Bridge, so that you can contemplate what awaits you. Until morning, you will be free to reconsider your choice.”

 _In your dreams_ , Han thought, executing a flawlessly formal bow before he turned on his heel. Chances were he’d live to regret this, but the feeling of clear purpose had been worth it. That, and the sensation of unlimited freedom.

* * *

“Will you be all right?” Leia’s voice crackled over the com speaker.

“Yes.” Through the segmented viewport, Luke stared at a spatter of stars, the nearest mountain like a wedge cut crudely from the dark. He’d taken shelter aboard the Falcon, the only place where he could bear to spend this night, the holo projection a wraith at the edge of his vision.

“Luke... I know how hard this is for you.” Leia’s tone changed, grew soft with grief. For him, for Han, and everything shared between them. “If there was anything I could do...”

“I know.” He swiveled the flight chair to look at the quarter-sized image that glimmered with Leia’s pained smile. Out of nowhere, he recalled how he’d wondered — uneasily, needlessly — how she’d react when she discovered the truth about Han and himself.

Until Leia caught them in a stolen embrace, before they’d even considered how to tell her. Profound surprise had tightened her features, followed by a low start of laughter. _Oh gods, I really should have known_. And amazement took her past an unspoken rest that dropped by the wayside.

“Thanks,” Luke added softly.

Leia shifted her shoulders. “I’ve checked up on this bridge,” she said, pinning shapeless worries down to practical matters. “For someone who’s not afraid of heights, it’s certainly not impossible to get across, but the area is known for rough weather and frequent storms. A sudden gale could―” She trailed off into a small, heavy shrug.

“I know. I’ve looked at the weather reports.” Luke sat up, leaning towards the bright drizzle of photons that conjured Leia’s face, an outline of unvoiced questions.

 _Can you keep Han from falling? Are you going to? Brace the winds and still the air, keep him safe_...

“You think he’d learn,” Leia said. “All those times that his stubbornness got him into trouble...” She paused, lips thinned in angry concentration. “I still don’t understand what got into him, but I suppose that’s a moot point by now.”

 _A choice_ , Luke thought, _that’s what it’s all about. Not destiny_. They’d both moved towards that brink, independently yet together, and until yesterday he’d trusted himself to that sense of current, of direction.

“Han doesn’t want protection from me... or anyone.”

Leia sighed, and her sympathy reached across, buttressed with optimistic evidence, all the things they both knew. Han had a fighter pilot’s honed senses, the reaction speed and coordination and the confidence to pull this off. His ingrained affinity to the present, too.

“Try to sleep,” she said finally, her voice gentle as doubt.

 _And what will you do tomorrow? Stand back and watch, for the sake of Han’s freedom?_ He had no answer to that.

“You too.” Luke flipped the switch that restored humming quiet to the Falcon’s cockpit.

He walked down the corridor in Han’s steps, through memories like cloud-drifts that blurred into each other. From the cabin’s door, he looked at the unmade bed and imagined the imprint of Han’s body on the mattress, the trace of several lonely nights and lingering warmth between the sheets. _As if I could take your place_.

When he stretched out on Han’s bunk, weariness pressed up against his senses and undermined the concentration he’d maintained all through a sleepless night and a day. Leia was right, he needed rest to be ready tomorrow.

He left the light on, the glowpanel’s flicker and burn through his closed lids a constant reminder, the pulse of reality. Under the weight of exhaustion, his mind sank fast and far, cast off from the ragged coast of night to steer into emptiness. But each time awareness tilted into oblivion, something jarred him back to his own racing heartbeat and clenching lungs, as if he’d tried to breathe vacuum. A sensation familiar from countless dreams of falling.

And each time, it peeled away another defensive layer, the skin of endurance grown across factual knowledge: each day could be the last. Collisions that laid him bare to the bone. _How would I live without you?_

It pierced him cold to the quick, like the perennial winter on Hoth where Han had stayed much longer than he’d planned. One headlong decision that trailed its long chain of events from Dagobah to Bespin to Tatooine. A life for a life, turn by turn, with algebraic precision. One for the other, but never _one_.

 _All those times, Han... all those times you put your life on the line for me. How can I ever―?_ Impossible, Luke thought, impossible to measure and quantify a life, everything it was. He was drifting again, from numerical abstraction out into twilight.

Alone in Han’s bunk, he dreamed the most predictable of dreams.

...moisture gathered all over his skin, steamed out of the swamps with a faint smell of rot. Damp air seethed with the buzz of insects, too slight and too fast to see, and he found himself on his back, spine bruised, mind still spinning. Through vertigo, Yoda’s voice carved a return path for him.

“Control, you must learn control!”

“I saw... a city in the clouds.” Awareness regrouped in fragments, around the tremor at his core. He felt torn and cut up from within, kaleidoscope splinters without pattern. _Future?_

The gray damp thickened, stole his breath. Yoda’s expression grew remote and unreadable. “Decide you must, how to serve them best.”

Decide. He was alone, listening to the lap of peaty water, soreness from his fall throbbing in his lower back.

 _At peace_ , he repeated to himself, over and over. To clear his head, he stretched outward and traced the rough shape of stones, cradling the Force around them while his mind explored the structure of molecules, burrowing deep to shut out the vision, shut out the dull thud of heartbeats battering his ribs. _I’ve got to go to them_.

The need pulled at him, a hook in his flesh, far from the reach of logic. Until something broke his concentration, invading with the force of alarm, and several hovering stones slipped from his grasp.

Steps through the undergrowth, the crackle of twigs and the squish of soggy earth beneath bootheels. A sound that didn’t belong here and started a fissure in the middle of reality.

 _A dream_ , it went through his head. _The past_. But he was still locked inside it, shivering in what pretended as sleep. Countless times, he’d been dragged through this loop of recollection, until distance cut its roots and it began to drift like Dagobah’s roaming thorn-scrub.

His dream-self pulled a shuddering breath. A strange shimmer glanced across layers of rotting leaves. And among the trees moved a tall shadow, purposeful and familiar.

“Han?” He was on his feet, half expecting the ground to dissolve into an unknown dreamscape.

“What’re you doin’ in a mudhole like this, kid?” Han spun around, raindrops glittering on his flight jacket.

“You can’t be here!” Luke snapped himself out of bewilderment. Over Han’s shoulder, his fighter’s wings gleamed pale through the fogs, and renewed urgency shot into his bloodstream. He glanced around for his discarded flightsuit. “I have to go.”

Han caught his shoulders in both hands. “Stay here. Stay with me tonight.”

“But I have to ― you’d die...” The words faltered in his throat. “Where are we?”

“Place matters not in the Force.” Yoda’s voice, a rustle of dry leaves on the ground.

“But this is―”

“Crazy?” Han’s mouth curled in a welcome, carefree grin. “So what’s new? Still, you gotta make up your mind.”

From the lowering gloom, his X-wing’s runlights flashed into sudden brilliance, a blinding white beam lancing across before Luke could close his eyes. And he jerked out of that hovering state, neither sleep nor meditation.

Han was stretched out on the bunk beside him, searching him across the short, equivocal distance. His eyes reflected Dagobah’s countless shades of brown, the deep golden greens of midday — and something else had changed about him. As if the dream had cast him in a different light.

“You’re _here_.” Breath tight in his chest, Luke leaned up to curve a hand around his shoulder. “I thought they’d―”

“Lock me up so I won’t disappear?” Han shook his head. “I’m free on parole ‘til morning. And where were you just now?”

He sank back, no longer sure of the dream’s boundaries. “Dagobah.” The dusky shadings and the rasp of insects over the swamp closed in when his eyes slipped shut. “You were there too, though you shouldn’t’ve been...”

“Where it all started.” Han’s palm traveled lightly up his chest, a suggestion, a private spell. His voice so low that it raised the fine hairs at the nape of Luke’s neck when he said, “Maybe that’s the place where you should go. Where we both need to be.”

The words freed something, and a barrier shifted, turning him from the dream’s borderlands into the wash of recollection.

 _Through the Force, things you will see_ , Yoda’s voice drifted from it. _Other places. The future... the past_.

“Han.” Luke gripped the hand on his chest. The pressure of dwindling time scaled up sharply, the friction of two realities grating through his bones at the onset of vision. Han’s breath close by his ear.

“Luke, show me...”

He couldn’t stop it. Once more, the washed-out images sluiced his mind, drove into him with cascading sensation. Strident pain, the brutal shock of cold attacking every cell of his body at once, and an awareness of Han’s presence so immediate and intense, it slammed into him like unfiltered solar flares. A tremor passed through the body next to him — Han was right there, warm and alive — recoiling roughly, as if from a feedback loop.

“Damn.” A harsh whisper in the glistening humid air. “I remember. The whole―”

“No ― it’s over!” His fingers closed hard around Han’s wrist. When he looked up, the half-lit cabin swayed out of drunken shadows and steadied into right angles.

“Never felt anything like _that_ before.” Han bent over him, his voice unsteady in the aftermath of a piercing recall. “Like ― the whole world trying to burst into my head.”

“It changed everything.” A salty taste lingered on Luke’s mouth, and swampland moisture crawled on his skin.

“Yeah, I can see how,” Han said slowly. And maybe that accounted for the change that turned his gaze sharp and etched his features like a light-trace. “Now tell me... You could’ve seen a million different things. Why me, and Leia?”

A startled sound burst out of him, not quite a laugh. “Because I loved you.”

“So there you’ve got it,” Han said. Dark brows knotted over a quick flash of pleasure. “You had a reason.”

“Yes,” Luke murmured. Time and necessity. Rising up through him and out and into the Force. And the moment of his choice stood out spiked with hope and fear. “It made all the difference for the things that happened afterwards.”

The entire sequence stretched out before him like burning dots stitched across night, caught together on a single thread. Love had rushed him towards his first encounter with his father, got crushed and ground down to flint-sparks, to almost nothing. But enough of a spark there, still, to fire his hope through the long dark that followed.

“Yeah, but that was _you_ , not the Force.” Han’s mouth brushed his knuckles, relief surging with a glitter in his eyes. “You gotta let it go, kid. That past and that future, they’re gone for good. Like you said, it’s over.”

“I know.” Luke glanced aside while a giddy sensation spread out from his stomach, swirled like charged slivers around a magnetic pole. He could almost see Dagobah curve away from him, and the memory gathering a misty pale gleam as it shivered between realities. “It’s... as if something just cut the ground from under my feet.”

“About time.” Han’s arms went around him, and the tense cast of his features relaxed into a lopsided smile. “Just be here, with me.”

No need to answer that, only the hitch in his breath when their mouths met, a troubled knot uncoiling into passion. The texture of Han’s lips, the prickle of a stubbled chin restored his bearings. All the heart-searing relief and impatience lurched forward, filled every moment to the limit, a bright counterpoint to the slow movements of Han’s mouth against his own.

“And now...” A rough murmur traced against his lips. “Tell me that you’re free to make your own choice.”

Time, and necessity. Interlocking with a push like an ache, but it was gone now, released into the wilder currents of possibility and hope. _I am_. Luke curved both hands around Han’s neck.

“Is that why?” His heart had gone into a slow, hard pound. Han was drawing him out on a ledge of time, the slender margin for his choice. “Why you chose the trial, the bridge—”

“I had _no_ idea where it’d get me,” Han stopped him. “Just had to be... free of everything, had to know I could do this. Look back and cut myself loose.” Long fingers brushed the side of Luke’s face and raked through his tangled hair, as if to size up the shape of an altered awareness. “This could be the last night we’ll ever have, or the first in a couple thousand more.”

“I don’t care.” Luke breathed in fast, on the verge of flight.

“Good. My call, for the rest of it.”

The sensual press of Han’s body echoed and reflected every word, tipped a balance in him, and touched an exposed nerve.

“Tomorrow,” Han said beside his ear. “Tomorrow’s gonna be a new start, that’s all.”

“No―” Luke broke off, the sensation of imminence reaching higher than every thought. “It’s now.”

 _Was_ now, as his fingers followed the curve of ribs beneath Han’s shirt and splayed out over his breastbone. Heartbeat, reverberation, a question answered. Han’s mouth lowered against his own. “Jump off that cliff with me?”

Luke’s breath dragged hard over the deep, hollow longing in his chest. They were getting close now, the tension changing direction, seeking a new focus.

They were about to gamble up the futures, all the thousands of possible futures, for the one that might collapse in another day. _I don’t want to live without you_. So simple. _But if I have to_...

 _Promise me. Promise you’ll always be there_.

So much to ask. Yet _always_ was a thing shaped entirely of the present.

“You realize that you’ve never asked me for anything before?” As if he’d heard every thought, Han reached for his hand. “I’m ready.”

And he knew, certainty soaring at a breath. His eyes burned with threatening heat.

“Now. Always.”

...

One crossing that links a split second to infinity. At every angle, he can feel the influx of the Force, brimming through the frontier of reason, playing through temporal bounds ― until it swarms bright and alive under his skin. Now.

...

At first, it is familiar, something slow and powerful rising through him as their eyes meet and their fingers link, a held breath drawn sharply into Han’s lungs that burns in his own chest. But it grows and keeps coming, and he’s falling ― plummeting through the core of himself at terrible speeds.

...

Then nothing.

...

The hand that holds his own is trembling. And he is torn upward again, on a mirror wave crashing through them both, expanding the limits of self and division, a burst at the body’s center like snapping out of a dream. And it’s like nothing they’ve known.

...

Answering need, a rush into the gap between them. _We are_ ―

Awake now, more awake than ever before. All they can do is hold each other’s eyes, every breath a new sensation as the skin of loneliness rips.

...

“This ― is it?” Shock loosens Han’s features, his voice, and flickers into recognition. “Goddamnit, this is so... beautiful...”

Luke can’t get a word out. Han is reaching back for him, and he can’t stop looking. At his eyes, his mouth, his hands. Through the brilliance of change, thought made touch, made real. Heartbeat that doubles his own, calling him home.

Laughter tightens his chest and breaks free. _Yes!_

And the warmth beating through his veins is both alien and familiar, joining him to the shape and direction of Han’s senses, like daylight refracted through water. Breathing the essence of light until it dissolves the weight and the limits of his body, reeling, storming out in every direction. Too much to take in all at once.

 _Hold me_.

Luke’s fingers trace the jutting angle of a shoulderbone, the clean lines of Han’s torso, and understanding with it, a slow journey. Set free of himself, this is his only mooring, and he feels the same in Han’s hands, searching blindly for the places in him that have opened up. They pause and falter at the dazzling pace of sensation, exploring without aim.

A live current strengthens between them, tributaries joined in a single flow.

 _This is what we are_.

 _This is just the beginning_.

They move and touch like divers in a sea of air, learning to slide with the pressure and the current. The melting lines of muscles that shift, smooth and fluid, beneath warmed fabric. Breaths dissolving into shadowplay between ribs that fan in and out. But the steadier flow is ruptured by jarring starts of awareness that strike their lightning at random intervals. Within and without reverse position in a heartbeat.

Luke finds his hand clutched around Han’s shoulder and his mouth at the hollow of Han’s throat where his breath is sheltered. Air torn from his lungs, he falls again into a wide open zone like the sky, until its aching brightness resolves into something he can understand. And this is the way Han sees him, all light and motion, an outline of intensity and recollection condensed into the present. His hands follow the lines of Han’s face and show him the same, gathering what stirs under his touch, rich and mercurial, fever chills raised from the dizzy loss of direction.

It doesn’t take words, except for the hoarse, winded pressure in his throat.

“You’re beautiful.”

His hands shaking slightly like his voice, from keeping too much energy contained within the tight space that connects them.

“You’ve always been so sure,” Han murmurs, between shallow bursts of pulse high in his chest. “And I didn’t know―”

Luke shakes his head. “Not always. Not like this.”

Yoda was right about him, about the way his mind kept rushing out towards any horizon, kept anticipating all the missing pieces beyond that imagined limit.

“I was thinking about the future, the past ― I never knew there could be... just one moment.”

But this is what he felt on Dagobah, what the cycle of dreams made him relive over and over. The sheer, violent essence of _now_. One moment’s joining.

He draws Han to him, retracing himself, skin alight under the pressure of flat chest and stomach, the definition of bones, until they’re gripped in a seamless embrace. Aimless desire arrows into focus, startling like an alien force. The stretch and throb of pulse, hard against his thigh, circling in the hollow between his hipbones. A cadence caught up in memories, other nights curled into the dark thrumming heat that’s trapped between them. When they make love now, every night before will be a part of it, like a long transit through dreams, burning up.

Strangeness fades along the paths their hands invent, reclaiming familiar terrain from the inside out. Luke can feel it swerve through him like a compass needle that targets each sensation and lights it like a flare. The silky bristle of hair at the center of Han’s chest against his knuckles, the rasp of breath where his lips fasten for the taste of him. His nipples harden at the brush of Han’s thumb, a sinuous frost fetching gasps into his throat.

Every touch charged at the approach of a storm front that has threatened to tear them apart ― and now it’s no longer enough. The brusque force in Han’s grip assails him with random power that escalates and demands release, a clear vector. Muscles pulling tight where they’re locked together in gradual movement; another jolt crushing Han’s chest against him.

Luke leans over to kiss him, to trade rough warmth for quickened breaths. In the twilight of closed eyes, dimensions come out of their wild spin and reassemble, lighter than before. A clear image formed out of sensation. The way they’re lying with each other, entangled on the narrow bunk, the sheet pulled halfway down his thighs. Han’s discarded shirt rumpled under his shoulder. He can sense what Han feels and the conditional limits of his own skin, joined and apart in a ceaseless exchange.

Han’s tongue is searching his mouth, circles and invades and draws him into a heady dance, anchors him in familiar play as they shift angles and deepen the kiss. His thigh pressed against Han’s groin where cloth stretches around the hard jut of arousal. Shocks of liquid electricity launch one after the next at the slow urging of Han’s body against him. A moan vibrates against his teeth.

Han breaks away and swallows, hazel eyes sparking with laughter and surprise at his own unsettled state. “I want you.” His fingers paint a swift path down Luke’s throat, along the tracks of pulse and tension. “It’s like we’d never ― I’d no idea―”

 _Me neither_.

Luke holds on harder, and it doesn’t stop, the closeness fires a hunger that bursts in short-cuts through the channels they’ve opened between them. It’s in every line of Han’s body, in the breathless surges that come and go. He levers up as those trembling starts wind up tighter, breathing across skin that’s scrimshawed with thin old scars, with memories of taste and touch, a private map changing constantly as his hands roam from side to hip, and coax at slanting muscle. Here, they have no history. Each unchecked response a leap within him, resonating through countless points of convergence.

He can feel the impulse that guides Han’s hand down his back before the touch lights on his skin, intimacy redoubled between them, like the rush of blood that echoes inside a shell.

Luke’s fingers loosen the belt, slide across warm leather and cloth, then delve inside to cup the solid cock. Abrupt pleasure ricochets from his chest to his groin as he feels Han arch and push into his touch, blindly falling into the cadence of pulse and intent. Another savage charge wheels through him, and he wants to touch everywhere at once, channel everything into the familiar power curves of arousal, and only a small part of it makes it into words that stumble out before he knows.

“I wish I could give you―”

Han stops him with a decisive move that reverses their positions and pins him to the mattress. “Just be here... that’s enough.”

Han moves over him to kiss him urgently, and his need whips through Luke’s body. He’s pressed up against Han, arched into the low, gut-wrenching wave of heat. Slender needles lance into raw places he’s never felt before, charting and piercing him. In rapid succession, they outline and eclipse the lonely brink where he’s been waiting ― and again the violent thrills churn faster and higher, more than he can take.

Luke catches himself from a faltering edge, and they stop, bewildered, grinning at the loose shivers that slip through them at a feathery caress.

He kneels up on the bunk to slide Han’s pants down the long legs, uncovering the familiar body. Light, skin and shadow. Alive under his lips, under his fingers, from the rough edge of a kneecap to the softer skin of Han’s inner thigh. The pulsing shaft grows harder in his hand until Han grabs him to clutch at his wrist. It’s going to take a lifetime to catch up with all the disparate threads that interlace between them. From the bright complexity of intuition and instinct to the glide of thoughts.

Beside him, Han sags against the mattress, long limbs caught in the tan shades of unsteady lighting. Luke answers a silent question, only to say it out loud.

“You first. I want you in me.”

He turns to the bedside locker, scratched duraplast rough against his palm, an assuring scrap of reality as he pulls a half-squashed tube from odds and ends inside the drawer. When he looks back at Han, the shadow of a steep drop is in his eyes. He’s thinking of the start they’ve made, that reckless leap.

“Had me scared for a moment,” Han mutters and links their fingers once more.

 _And I never believed, not really_ ― Luke molds against him to share that remembered sting of doubt. Now that every limit can be breached.

“Come here... I need you close...”

 _Now I can show you_ ―

Han shakes his head. _You think I didn’t know?_

“You hear that?” The dark brows knot for a moment as Han flounders between bafflement and laughter.

Luke gives a nod ― sometimes it’s as if Han’s voice flits across his own mind, but mostly it’s an unstoppable, variable flow. He runs his hands up the long back to the shoulder blades and holds Han against the feeling that’s clenching in his chest. Eyes closing when careful fingers probe and find no resistance, a jab of primal pleasure seizing tight in his gut. Closest to him when he lets go completely.

One moment’s fullness unlocks to embrace a life, and he needs to be located inside his body, to reach back. He guides Han with his hands, with fractured thoughts as every boundary breaks down inside him.

The rawness of it sears through his entire frame as if they’ve never done this before. The push, the claiming pressure as Han enters him, his thighs locking hard around Han’s torso. A frantic heartbeat pitching in his throat, listing sharply towards the rhythm that waits to claim them.

He gasps with the need to be filled, flung to the edge of vertigo ― too much...

“Luke... I’m here.”

Intensity flares and levels, surrenders to the soothing palm placed flat against his chest. All that he is gains definition under Han’s hands. Between one breath and the next, he feels like he’s diving through Han’s inner spaces, the way he knows himself inside his own body, and every gesture answers that knowledge ― the warm touch of those hands loving him, like the very first night. Steadied, balanced, turned loose again.

With a gentle rocking of the hips, Han presses into him, and a deeper thrill reels like a shout through his senses. Rocked like a storm, with every thrust, every long stroke that fills him completely. Hoarse moans bursting up his throat. The Force pulsing between them as their bodies strain for each other.

_you just you_

He’s caught against Han’s rhythm, the hard mattress against his back, the blurry shine of the glowpanel falling across the muscles in Han’s arms ― each perception sharply defined in that light as he feels Han move inside him. A shimmer of sweat at Han’s temple. Between hard drumrolls of pulse, closeness builds in shattered waves. His hands reach for Han’s face, and his hips push off the bunk, urging him deeper. Every moment cuts through him and raises the pressure within, heated motion that finally takes flight. Releasing broken sounds, his own body tight around Han’s shorter thrusts, so far inside him that he can’t breathe. A deep groan racks his chest, his whole body feverish with chills.

 _Luke_. A voice, a touch at his center, completion. Held safe and released into a wholeness he’s never felt in his life. He shudders as Han reaches for him, surging with the spill of heat between them, into him. And there’s nothing but the driving motion, the deep aching joy that takes them at the same instant, together. A final thrust from them both, crushed into long segments of breathing.

...  
...

Han caught his weight on his elbows, every breath coming hard and shaky, with stunned sounds of passionate overload. Luke cradled him, breathed with him, and said nothing but his name.

The future had collapsed into the narrow space between them, and the beat of time gentled where his hand lay against Han’s chest.

* * * * *

  
**~ 5 ~**  


Morning vaulted the mountains, an intangible blue pane above masses of slate, basalt and striated quartz. Transports of every size littered the slope and the jutting plateau where spectators thronged. Between the crowd and the smaller circle of select witnesses, guards in somber purple presented ceremonial weapons.

When Luke climbed from the speeder, he spotted Leia in the huddle, wind tousling her white robe and cape. A faint iron taste merged through the stark colors of morning. He took a step into that abrasive wind, felt its strength and velocity as it eddied around him. In the east, harsh light fanned around teeth of graphite crystal, breaking into waves that rolled over him and joined endless drifts of Force energy. Thin, cold air pricked his lungs, a surface sensation skating above the brightness that suffused him for a moment.

As he walked across the plateau, Luke felt his insides tighten, a resonance at his core like the signal pulse from an echo locator. Strangeness spread out from the live connection between Han and himself, to change and color his perception of the Force, rushing his senses into boundless amazement. _Focus_ , he told himself. There’d be time for exploration later.

Leia approached him in quick strides, chin lifted with the kind of determined cheer that held every concern at bay. “Luke. Everything all right?”

She reached for his arm, cape billowing at a gush from high-powered repulsor jets. Some twenty meters on their left, an armored shuttle settled onto weathered rock.

“You look as if...” She paused, eyes narrowed for scrutiny, and something brought an abrupt smile to her face. “No, you’re glowing.”

“I’m―” Luke broke off at the catch in his voice, the warmth that crawled up his throat, and pulled her into a quick embrace.

“Fine,” Leia finished for him. “I can tell.”

Subliminal strain faded as her arms came around him. Her glance swung to the side where Han had just stepped down from the landed vehicle, flanked by a masked escort. The old swagger in his step spelled blatant unconcern as he crossed towards them.

“Looks like a party.” He cocked an eyebrow at the restive crowds. “Anybody thought of selling tickets for the high-wire act?”

“Do me a favor,” Leia said. “Be careful.”

“Don’t worry.” Han slung an arm around her shoulders, and tossed out a grin for good measure. “I ain’t done rufflin’ your feathers yet.”

“I should have guessed,” Leia retorted with mock sternness. “Testing the limits of other people’s endurance has always been a major incentive for you.”

Standing a pace apart, Luke watched them, his hands clenched around an unreasoning impulse to touch. Not now. Something far too volatile pressed up behind it, and he reached through the link instead. Still unprepared for the power rebounding through him, charged with the long hours of night. When their eyes locked for another second, reflections of it smoldered in Han’s gaze. Silence tightened into a troubled accord and spanned the distance when Han turned aside to climb a winding footpath. Luke couldn’t wrench his eyes away until he’d disappeared amidst the debris of black, igneous rock.

“Luke...” Leia’s hand was back on his arm, a slight tremor winding into her touch. “You’re not alone.”

 _What happens if Han falls?_ Luke guessed what she couldn’t make herself ask and breathed in hard. _We’re one, and apart_. A paradox he’d chosen to live, from this moment onward.

“I know.” He smiled at Leia. “Time to go.”

At the head of the procession, the D’haya strode beneath a canopy several attendants held poised above her. Behind her marched the dignified train of ladies and the visiting delegation with bowed heads, and all twenty-five members of the jury. The pass they climbed dipped towards a steep gorge, cleaved from the rocks in a stark zigzag as if carved by thunder. A perpendicular drop breathing magnetic cold.

Luke walked to the end of the ledge, past a tide of inquisitive glances, needles of light bouncing in scores off the dark goggles. If anyone suspected that he might use the Force to manipulate the ordeal’s outcome, they had no way of stopping him. His vision narrowed to the truesteel crossbeam, a horizontal slash across the depth of rock and sky. Impossibly straight. Unreal.

Through the wind, a hum filled the air, a single trebling note. Sunflares seared around the frame of a man on the edge of a cliff. In the blink of an eye, the vista disintegrated, a jigsaw puzzle of shadows and blind brilliance, stone and air, like polar crests of the Force.

Luke braced himself, the windchill piercing his tunic with the savage bite of fear, strong enough to claw his control apart. From the twists of rebellious need, he strained for acceptance. He touched the place within him where Han would always be sheltered and found his balance there.

 

Perfect day for an execution. Han looked at the sky and mustered every reserve of ironic detachment.

He held up a hand to gauge the direction of the winds holding their confabs in these parts of the mountains. One after the other, he rolled his shoulders, stretched every tight muscle through another warm-up, only half-listening to the Prosecutor’s pep talk.

The basic idea came through like a message transmitted in efficient burst. In case he’d changed his mind, now was the time to back off and throw himself headlong into the waiting arms of a prison sentence. Han shook his head no, enough adrenaline pumping through him to rouse a dead bantha.

Beyond a range of snowy peaks loomed cloud banks that might head a storm front. He gave himself another moment to level out his breathing. Hyperventilating was hardly a good idea under the circumstances. _No worries_ , he told himself. By the time that storm broke overhead, he’d have cleared the danger zone. He chanced a look at the bridge.

Last night, when he’d been brought here to make friends with his own decision, the bridge had gleamed in lethal silver, thin as a wire, pointing into darkness. Now it looked reassuringly solid, scoured steel anchored deep in the rock on either side.

Han took off his boots and let a brisk chill run down his spine, dissipating at the next breath. The Prosecutor had lifted a hand to cast a fluttery gesture at him, a blessing or a sign of condemnation. But from the look of it, that concluded the ceremonies and the sooth-saying.

Han dropped his vest and his gunbelt on the ground, to offer the least resistance to the wind. On the other side of the bridge, Joram Plastedd had positioned himself like the gatekeeper to eternity. The whole scene had the flavor of a low-budget holoflick for the late-night programs, starring Han Solo as the virtuous penitent, barefoot and eating crow. Once the media people heard about it, they’d tear their hair out over missing such a freak event.

Another step to the edge, and he aimed his gaze high. Never look down. A hundred paces at most, a short stretch separating him from the rest of his life. The thought gripped him with the memory of leaving the Falcon, before first light. Luke’s face in the jaded dark, a brittle kind of sobriety coming apart at the seams. A single touch released it all into hope that burned. Not a parting.

 _You know what you are to me. You’ll always know that, no matter what happens_.

Life. With a resolute step forward, Han plunged himself into the memory, drawing its embers close enough to blur into abstract brightness, until it blanked his mind. He set a foot on the bridge.

Not the freezing rebuff he’d expected. The truesteel surface had soaked up the sun and felt warm against the sole of his foot. Air currents shifted around him like a wobbly array of cushions. Coolness rose out of his lungs and into his head.

He felt absurdly young, at the beginning of everything, just like the day when he’d claimed the Falcon and his independence with her. Immortal.

 _Yeah, keep that up and you’ll get to test the theory_. Han took a first step forward and felt the subliminal sway, the strain within doubly-bonded metal, wind breaking against the rock below, a sound like the ocean. A split second’s whim released the voice of his grandad, reciting spooky tales of sea-devils and heroic pirates crossing the plank to kingdom come.

The wind had picked up, twisting itself into fitful, unpredictable swirls. Han kept his eyes straight ahead as he walked at a careful pace. Too fast and he’d slip; too slow, and the jostling winds that tumbled through these crags would start preying on him. A trickle of sweat crept down the side of his neck, mopped up in an instant by the blast that hit him at a cant of thirty degrees. He compensated, angling his torso into the slipstream.

Quick vibrations ran through the steel under his feet, like displaced heartbeats. The quivers that chased through his backbone recalled storm cells buffeting the Falcon during each planetfall on Corellia, as if they’d flayed his own skin. Close to the middle of the bridge now, the winds’ easy target. Somewhere on his left, sunlight hit a glacier’s crust and glanced off in a blinding spray. Han blinked dark specks out of his sight as he took another step.

A violent blast came straight from the side, hurling into him like an invisible ram. Breath froze in his chest as he thrust his arms out, every muscle in his body fighting for balance. Death was right before him, a clean cut, a pull more powerful than the gravity well below. But his mind circled elsewhere, drawn into the radius of a steady beacon.

With a dazzling kind of clarity, he could feel Luke’s presence beneath the surface of his mind, like an underground river. The calm Luke projected, absorbing every sensation, and through it, spikes of visceral fear. The night on Kashyyyk flared from recollection like sparks from a short-circuit, and Han reached back with the same instinct. _I’m here_.

The air sang around him, but more flooded the link in sequential heaves. Something with the power of a cyclone, churning in every direction, charging Luke just like the wind that battered at him. For a moment, blanched rocks flashed bright as crystal.

So this was it. The Force, immense and piercing, collapsing the difference between life and death. Beautiful as the light itself. And so goddamned lonely.

Sensations cleared, and Han felt the riptides of energy converge, channeled through one man’s life. Vast enough to tear Luke apart, if he couldn’t keep a hold on himself and give it direction.

 _I know_ , Han thought, _I know you need me_ ― sure that Luke would pick up the sentiment, if not the words.

And even now, Luke was prepared to let him go. A necessity ― and the right kind of balance, the counterbalance he needed to take the next step.

_Right with you, Luke. I said I’d come back, remember?_

Another cold gust whipped through his shirt and flipped his hair into his face. Whistled obnoxiously in his ear. Then the steady surf resumed below, and he picked up its rhythm, the transient glitters of whitecaps bobbing before his inner sight. Ahead of him lay a silver line, closer than the barbed chills, the crawl of alarm that conquered his skin. _Just hang in there_...

He gasped. The ground had changed beneath his feet, fell away at a sudden tilt, wrinkled and coarse. A phantom sensation of falling spun his head, and Han stumbled forward, the stab of frigid air in his lungs. His stomach lurched. Joram Plastedd reached a hand to him.

Before Han could steady himself, the hot essence of exhilaration reeled through him, wild with relief. His throat tight and dry, he took it into himself like a deep breath.

“You okay?” asked a nervous voice.

Out of vertigo, Han sent a backward glance over his shoulder, at the long drop down, and his stomach turned to water. He breathed out a curse and felt every bit as shaky as if he’d walked on air.

Joram wore the look of a chastened culprit. “Glad you made it, Solo. Honest.”

 

Leia’s whoop turned several heads in the ruler’s retinue. Heart leaping against his ribs, Luke swayed back, without breath to spare for a shout of his own. Through a funnel of multiple echoes, the D’haya’s voice rang back from the rocks. Loose energy aligned itself to solid outlines, and the world steadied.

“For a moment I really thought...” Leia leaned against him and let the words trail out into a sigh.

Luke nodded, breathless, the keening of winds still tight in his chest as they drew back from the canyon’s edge. Laughter and tears scrabbling in his throat. At the top of the pass, something flicked his consciousness and whipped him into an abrupt turn.

“Hey!” Several steps ahead of Joram Plastedd, Han came jogging towards them.

Luke crossed the last stretch at a run, and they collided somewhere in the middle, with all the graceless fervor of that first exuberant hug in the hangar on Yavin Four, laughing at their own clumsiness.

For long moments, they stayed motionless within that blind deadlock, arms wrapped hard around each other, as if physical contact had taken out thought and intent in a single sweep. Until Luke reached up and pulled Han’s mouth down against his own, tasting him, breathing him in, a slow burst of deliverance in every nerve.

The kiss ended for a breath. “I’d volunteer for another stunt like that anytime...” Han gave him a look through lowered lashes. “...if that’s my reward.”

Luke dug his fingers into the sweat-stained shirt. “Don’t count on it.”

“You still owe me one from last night, remember?” Han murmured, and blew a curling strand away from his ear.

Residual alarm eased into lush ripples that tautened the muscles in Luke’s belly. He could feel Han’s elation leap from mind to nerve, as if the connection between them had heightened all his senses, blending one into the other. Time, place and propriety came back to him like dubious forms through a fog.

The D’haya had called the signals concluding the procedures, her face rough-cast with practiced sobriety by the time she turned away. Her glance passed over them as if they’d already left. Like a long shadow, the retinue of robed ladies flowed after her.

“And that’s that,” Han muttered out of the corner of his mouth. “Aren’t we glad.”

“That depends.” Leia had caught up with them, a slow flush driving the pallor out of her cheeks. “The Council is bound to agree with me that the talks will proceed more smoothly without you two, after this.”

“What, you’re dismissing us?” Han slung his arm across Luke’s shoulders, pulled him back close, and didn’t even try to mask his relief.

Leia arched her eyebrows. “I think you’ve completed your own mission here, haven’t you, General?” She smoothed her wind-ruffled hair with an exaggerated gesture. “While I’ve aged at least a _year_ during the past twenty minutes...”

“You don’t look it, Your Worship,” Han drawled.

“Well. Congratulations,” she said dryly. The look she sent Luke implied something more, and after a moment, Han muttered awkward thanks.

“Now can we—?” he started, and broke off again with a backward glance. “Guess not.”

From the scattering crowds, Kiéru stalked up slowly, hands buried in the pockets of an oversized tunic. She stopped a pace away and eyed them with a mixture of curiosity and wariness. “Listen, uh, Luke... I don’t expect you’ll come back to the library anytime soon.”

“Not too soon, no,” Luke said carefully. “I still need answers to many questions, but I won’t find them in the past.”

Kiéru shuffled her feet. “Remember what I asked you? Are you going to train me?”

Disengaging from the death grip Han kept on him, Luke picked up a small, coarse-grained stone and placed it in her hand. “Keep it and listen to it. Perhaps it’s going to tell you where your place is.”

“Is this some kind of test?” When she frowned, Luke noticed that she’d shaved off her eyebrows. “What if it doesn’t tell me anything?”

“Come and see me, and we’ll talk about it.”

Her expression lightened several shades, into a hopeful kind of skepticism. “All right.” She dropped the stone into a baggy pocket, retreating a step. “I’ll see you ‘round, I suppose.”

“You’ll be welcome anytime,” Luke said.

As they watched her go, Han’s arm tightened once more around his waist. “C’mon, let’s head back to the Falcon.” He leaned closer, his lowered voice chasing a quick frisson down the side of Luke’s neck, “...and I’m all yours.”

* * *

Later, Han lay sprawled out on his stomach, his face half-buried in the rumpled sheet. Luke leaned over to place his mouth between his shoulder blades, fingers painting a line down Han’s backbone in the wavering light. Caressing the live warmth of skin and the soul that pulsed through it. The slowly leveling breaths. Part of him still soared with the heady tremors and the power that shattered every limit.

 _Live each moment in the Force_ , he remembered. _Be the present_. It was one of the few precepts from the old order’s writings he could subscribe to without second thoughts. The present spun out into shifting dimensions through the bond.

... _and nothing can come between us_.

Han lifted his head to fling a hazy glance over his shoulder. “You’re still thinkin’ about what might’ve happened.”

“Not exactly, but...” The day’s events materialized with a cutting crystalline edge and the taste of the wind. “I didn’t think I could do it,” Luke said slowly. “Stand back without interfering if anything went wrong.”

“You know what got me across?” Han turned over and settled both hands on his shoulders. “I was so focused on you, and the things you felt. All that energy. It was like... nothing’s impossible.”

“That was the Force. Not me.”

Han shook his head. “I could feel that you need me.”

“I love you.”

He had to say it out loud and listened to the sound of his own voice over a distance while Han’s palm traveled leisurely down his chest. Just words, like the dry descriptions of the bond that captured only the linear connection. Luke tangled his fingers into dark hair, the wordless answer making an impact that hollowed his chest.

 _So much_... His mind slipped along the countless threads between them, exploring possibilities without thought or aim. Until something gave him direction, a subtle change of texture like the ripples of wind through grass, describing a path for him. Gently closing others.

He pulled back, bewildered. “How d’you do that?”

“Just tryin’ things out.” A start of surprise dissolved into Han’s lazy grin. “Gotta keep some things a mystery, right?”

 _And keep your freedom_. Luke eased into his embrace, from the swirls of discovery to the simple touch of a hand at the small of his back. _If I’d known before_...

“What you worried about,” Han started, caught to the drift of his thinking. “If something happened to you—”

“I was wrong,” Luke admitted before he could finish. “Some things, we can’t predict or control.” 

He could still see it, cut into his memory in a blaze of daylight and steep, saw-toothed black, the thready life-and-death balance tossed up against time. The moment when Han threw his arms wide, ready to defy what neither of them could escape. The moment when his own breathing stopped.

A moment like that would inevitably come for them, from the future that he could not see, a great blast through the Force opening a gash as wide as continents. And the light that poured through it. _One, and apart_.

He closed his eyes. “It’s a blessing not to know, sometimes.”

Han chuckled softly, his unshaved chin moving with a slight rasp against Luke’s temple. “Welcome to the Force-blind view of the universe.”

“You,” Luke said and turned his head, “have never been blind.”

“Yeah, ‘xcept when they—”

“Not even then.” His lips brushed the corner of Han’s mouth, the curl of a slow smile. “I was there, remember?”

“Smart-ass,” Han muttered and settled back with a deep, drowsy breath.

Twilight ran through Luke’s senses, laced through every point of contact, through scraps of memory that sparked and took flight. Cradled in the Falcon’s metallic shadows, in the low buzz from life-support systems and the faint smell of spilled coolant, he felt Han’s mind glide towards sleep, and the swerving flow settled into a slender, solid link.

 

**~ ~ ~ Coda ~ ~ ~**

Outside played the motley colors of hyperspace, the glimmering void that stirred space-time-coordinates into a volatile mix. Han stretched his legs under the flight console. Only the hardcore math wizards could wrap their brains around the equations that defined every jump to lightspeed, but right now he felt connected to it on a gut level. Like his mind had gone off on a tangent that got him in tune with things outside linearity. And his unadmitted fascination for those mesmeric hyperlights made a new kind of sense.

 _Goin’ all mystical, Solo?_ He grinned at himself when a slight noise blended in with the drive’s resonant purr. Tinny whispers afloat in the Falcon’s corridor. Han checked their relative position on the nav display and pushed to his feet. Less than ten minutes ‘til they’d cut back to sublight.

When he entered the lounge, Luke had parked the portable replayer on the game table and sat watching a run of unsteady images. They’d picked up a two-credit news chip during stopover in the Mid-Rim.

As Han stepped closer, the static-grizzled projection coalesced into a pair of back-lit figures: Leia and the D’haya bent over printouts on the conference table. The newsreel reported moderate success at the conclusion of the talks on Dareil.

“Leia’s gotta be relieved,” Han said, though the poor resolution made a riddle of facial expressions. Sometimes he suspected that whoever produced those popular two-bit chips kept the visuals grainy on purpose, to make them look like the real and rare grit. “And she’ll never want me on a diplomatic delegation again,” he added. “Not that I’m gonna volunteer.”

“Don’t be too sure.” Luke glanced up, his forearm still resting across his knees. “I got the impression that the trial did make a difference.”

Han watched the D’haya’s holographic clone straighten and recalled the look she’d given him afterwards, her tight-jawed admission that an offworld low-life had managed to surprise her. But on the whole, Han reckoned she’d softened her attitude only because her snag-the-Jedi gambit had fallen through.

He’d opened his mouth to say as much when the news digest flashed to a preview for a forthcoming feature and a breathless voice piped up. A voice he recognized.

“...reveals exciting new information about the gang wars that once raged in the Huttese sector, and relates how General Han Solo, notorious jack-of-all-trades, found himself entangled in a near-inescapable web of intrigue and illegal arms traffic.”

“Oh, brother...” Han plunked down on the couch beside Luke.

“Alagrid Tenhanar, for Coruscant PrimeNet,” the teaser finished, a clangorous fanfare drowning out Han’s chuckle.

“Well, that’s one blotch off my rap sheet, I guess.”

Luke slanted him a long, dubious glance. “How did you get them to believe you?”

“Maybe they scared up old Plastedd’s records and figured he wasn’t cut out for the role of innocent victim.” Han shrugged eloquently. “Not that it matters. I’m their shiny toy this week, and next week they’ll start trashing me with whatever else comes up.”

Bright as laughter, a tendril of Luke’s mood stole through his mind and snaked a pleasant shiver down his back. Sure took some time, getting used to that effortless intimacy.

“I don’t know.” Luke switched off the replayer as the image cross-faded to a commercial for the next generation of self-adjusting spin-dryers. “They’re bound to find out about the ordeal, and that will tie in well with the panegyrics.”

Before Han could fire off another derisive quip, a jangling bleep sounded from the cockpit.

“Two minutes,” he said, but Luke was already on his feet. As they headed down the corridor, their approach vector to Yavin Four painted itself out in Han’s mind — and an unpleasant notion struck at the same time.

“Damn,” he muttered as he slid into the flight chair. “Chewie...”

Luke settled in beside him and checked the scopes. “What’s wrong?”

“Chewie. The big lug’s gonna tear me in strips soon as he finds out about the whole affair!”

Though he tried hard enough for a look of straight-faced sympathy, amusement danced in Luke’s eyes.

“Go ahead,” Han growled, producing a mock-glare for effect, “have fun at my expense. You’d change your mind if you’d ever been forced to spend weeks with a sulkin’ Wookiee at close quarters!”

The navicomp whistled out a short sequence, and Han pulled the lever on its mark. Out of the distorting white ripples, stars bounced up and shrank into familiar patterns. “Maybe _you_ could tell him and explain what happened.”

“All of it?” Luke’s expression filled with memory, and a piercing backwash poured into the bond. It caught in Han’s nerves like lightning dropping towards exposed power lines. Nothing was the same anymore, with these moments of light falling into him.

Luke swallowed sharply. “We’ll have to work on shielding techniques, I suppose... and countless other things.”

“Fine by me.” Han fueled his response with a suggestive heat that undermined every notion of shielding. He could almost taste the future, life ahead of them emerging like a coastline out of a haze. “So long as I don’t get included in the chop-wood-and-practice-humility program.”

Luke’s features steadied into a simulation of Jedi detachment. “We’ll see about that.”

“You fake,” Han murmured. He leaned over the side of his chair to skim his lips across the vulnerable spot behind Luke’s jaw, his mind shaping an image of Luke working alongside his would-be students, bare-chested in the sunlight. “I hope this means I’ll always know when you need me.”

Luke answered him without words. Against Han’s lips stirred a quicker pulse that mingled with his own in a fugue pattern. He could feel immense warmth slip through him, its looseness and generosity.

 _Always_. Strange how the concept had become real, like a clear mark on a nav chart. Steady and solid from one angle, and from another it fanned out towards a myriad possible trajectories, a secret line of movement.

 _A bond that doesn’t restrain anything_ , Han thought. _Try explainin’ that to anyone_.

But the difference showed clear in Luke’s eyes, startling and powerful like a sunflare. And Han knew for a fact that he’d never seen him so glad, so much at peace with himself. Not since Bespin. Since Dagobah.

 _So this is how it’s gonna be_. His heartbeat was in his throat, riding up on a surge of giddy joy. _All of it_.

He could still feel it when he looked straight ahead through the viewport and his hands took their independent path across the controls. Out of the sector’s mottled darkness rose the primary, its corona sputtering with plasma eruptions. Nosed into a steep dive, the Falcon arrowed past the sun’s curve, a razor of light.

“You know...” With a slap to the board, Han confirmed their landing coordinates and sat back. “I’d hate to see all this taken apart in public.”

A story without proper end or beginning, a fabric of choice and rogue chances captured in dangling threads, the real turning points lost somewhere between the lines. Viewed from a distance, it probably wouldn’t make any sense.

Luke met his eyes with the thoughtless, beautiful smile that always got under his skin, and his hand closed over Han’s wrist. “Let them try.”

Stars glittered from the far side of the Denarii nebula, a handful of spray tossed up by a restless sea. Much closer, a green moon hung among trailing spindrift, its bright spills like the joining of two rivers.

Yavin Four. Han turned his hand to link their fingers. _Home_.

* * * * *

**Author's Note:**

> First published in ELUSIVE LOVER 4, 2000.
> 
> The lines about love that Luke reads during his first visit to the archive were borrowed from Khalil Gibran’s _The Prophet_ (1923).


End file.
